Chapter 2

The rare book that differs from the rest has a _bizarrerie_ with its originality, and in the poems of 1830 there was, assuredly, more than enough of the bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epithets, and words like “tendriltwine” seemed provokingly affected. A kind of lusciousness, like that of Keats when under the influence of Leigh Hunt, may here and there be observed. Such faults as these catch the indifferent eye when a new book is first opened, and the volume of 1830 was probably condemned by almost every reader of the previous generation who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of fifty-six pieces only twenty-three were reprinted in the two volumes of 1842, which won for Tennyson the general recognition of the world of letters. Five or six of the pieces then left out were added as _Juvenilia_ in the collected works of 1871, 1872. The whole mass deserves the attention of students of the poet’s development.

This early volume may be said to contain, in the germ, all the great original qualities of Tennyson, except the humour of his rural studies and the elaboration of his Idylls. For example, in _Mariana_ we first note what may be called his perfection and accomplishment. The very few alterations made later are verbal. The moated grange of Mariana in _Measure for Measure_, and her mood of desertion and despair, are elaborated by a precision of truth and with a perfection of harmony worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from the natural scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. _Isabel_ (a study of the poet’s mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately dignity; while _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_ attest the power of refined luxury in romantic description, and herald the unmatched beauty of _The Lotos-Eaters_. _The Poet_, again, is a picture of that which Tennyson himself was to fulfil; and _Oriana_ is a revival of romance, and of the ballad, not limited to the ballad form as in its prototype, _Helen of Kirkconnell_. Curious and exquisite experiment in metre is indicated in the _Leonine Elegiacs_, in _Claribel_, and several other poems. Qualities which were not for long to find public expression, speculative powers brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions, were attested by _The Mystic_, and _Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself_, an unlucky title of a remarkable performance. “In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we find the soul urging onward

‘Thro’ utter dark a full-sail’d skiff, Unpiloted i’ the echoing dance Of reboant whirlwinds;’

and to the question, ‘Why not believe, then?’ we have as answer a simile of the sea, which cannot slumber like a mountain tarn, or

‘Draw down into his vexed pools All that blue heaven which hues and paves’

the tranquil inland mere.” {16}

The poet longs for the faith of his infant days and of his mother—

“Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew The beauty and repose of faith, And the clear spirit shining thro’.”

That faith is already shaken, and the long struggle for belief has already begun.

Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not _un esprit puissant_. Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood of negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally agree with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost in boyhood, he had already faced the ideas which, to one of his character, almost meant despair: he had not kept his eyes closed. To his extremely self-satisfied accusers we might answer, in lines from this earliest volume (_The Mystic_):—

“Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn; Ye cannot read the marvel in his eye, The still serene abstraction.”

He would behold

“One shadow in the midst of a great light, One reflex from eternity on time, One mighty countenance of perfect calm, Awful with most invariable eyes.”

His mystic of these boyish years—

“Often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom.”

In this poem, never republished by the author, is an attempt to express an experience which in later years he more than once endeavoured to set forth in articulate speech, an experience which was destined to colour his finial speculations on ultimate problems of God and of the soul. We shall later have to discuss the opinion of an eminent critic, Mr Frederic Harrison, that Tennyson’s ideas, theological, evolutionary, and generally speculative, “followed, rather than created, the current ideas of his time.” “The train of thought” (in _In Memoriam_), writes Mr Harrison, “is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr Martineau, _Ecce Homo_, _Hypatia_.” Of these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only orally, could have reached the author of _The Mystic_ and the _Supposed Confessions_. _Ecce Homo_, _Hypatia_, Mr Jowett, were all in the bosom of the future when _In Memoriam_ was written. Now, _The Mystic_ and the _Supposed Confessions_ are prior to _In Memoriam_, earlier than 1830. Yet they already contain the chief speculative tendencies of _In Memoriam_; the growing doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar to Tennyson, though not to “ordinary English readers”), the longing for a return to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences which helped Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these things he was original. Even as an undergraduate he was not following “a train of thought made familiar” by authors who had not yet written a line, and by books which had not yet been published.

So much, then, of the poet that was to be and of the philosopher existed in the little volume of the undergraduate. In _The Mystic_ we notice a phrase, two words long, which was later to be made familiar, “Daughters of time, divinely tall,” reproduced in the picture of Helen:—

“A daughter of the Gods, divinely tall, And most divinely fair.”

The reflective pieces are certainly of more interest now (though they seem to have satisfied the poet less) than the gallery of airy fairy Lilians, Adelines, Rosalinds, and Eleänores:—

“Daughters of dreams and of stories,”

like

“Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Félise, and Yolande, and Juliette.”

Cambridge, which he was soon to leave, did not satisfy the poet. Oxford did not satisfy Gibbon, or later, Shelley; and young men of genius are not, in fact, usually content with universities which, perhaps, are doing their best, but are neither governed nor populated by minds of the highest and most original class.

“You that do profess to teach And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.”

The universities, in fact, teach a good deal of that which can be learned, but the best things cannot be taught. The universities give men leisure, books, and companionship, to learn for themselves. All tutors cannot be, and at that time few dreamed of being, men like Jowett and T. H. Green, Gamaliels at whose feet undergraduates sat with enthusiasm, “did _eagerly_ frequent,” like Omar Khayyám. In later years Tennyson found closer relations between dons and undergraduates, and recorded his affection for his university. She had supplied him with such companionship as is rare, and permitted him to “catch the blossom of the flying terms,” even if tutors and lecturers were creatures of routine, _terriblement enfonces dans la matière_, like the sire of Madelon and Cathos, that honourable citizen.

Tennyson just missed, by going down, a visit of Wordsworth to Cambridge. The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees. The purpose was political—to aid some Spanish rebels. The fruit is seen in _Œnone_ and _Mariana in the South_.

In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father. “He slept in the dead man’s bed, earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came.” “You see,” he said, “ghosts do not generally come to imaginative people;” a remark very true, though ghosts are attributed to “imagination.” Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of _phantasia_ which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who met themselves, what poet ever did “see a ghost”? One who saw Tennyson as he wandered alone at this period called him “a mysterious being, seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others.” But it was the world of the poet, not of the “medium.”

The Tennysons stayed on at the parsonage for six years. But, anticipating their removal, Arthur Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy about the identification in the district of places in his friend’s poems—“critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the brook,” as,—in fact, critic after critic has done. Tennyson disliked—these “localisers.” The poet’s walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then affianced to his sister Emily.

II. POEMS OF 1831–1833.

BY 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson’s second volume were circulating in MS. among his friends, and no poet ever had friends more encouraging. Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness among their acquaintance for effusions in manuscript, or in proof-sheets. The charmed volume appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced as “infamous” Lockhart’s review in the _Quarterly_. Infamous or not, it is extremely diverting. How Lockhart could miss the great and abundant poetry remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of enabling him to praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and “preciosity,” of which the new book was not destitute. He had been among Wordsworth’s most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the “Cockney School” clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he _did_ repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, his censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, many passages of a fine absurdity criticised by the infamous reviewer. One could name great prose-writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous errors to which their attention was called by critics. Prose-writers have been more sensitively attached to their glaring blunders in verifiable facts than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste.

_The Lady of Shalott_, even in its early form, was more than enough to give assurance of a poet. In effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the same or a similar legend in _Elaine_. It has the charm of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities may have been really present to the mind of the young poet, aware that he was “living in phantasy.” The alterations are usually for the better. The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to assert in the first form—

“The yellow-leavèd water-lily, The green sheathed daffodilly, Tremble in the water chilly, Round about Shalott.”

Nobody can prefer to keep

“Though the squally east wind keenly Blew, with folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly Lady of Shalott.”

However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort—

“All raimented in snowy white That loosely flew,”

as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped from the airs of mysterious romance:—

“They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest; There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits at Camelot.”

Hitherto we have been “puzzled,” but as with the sublime incoherences of a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, “Bless my stars!” as perhaps we should also have done in the circumstances—a dead lady arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for “her blood was frozen slowly,” as was natural, granting the weather and the lady’s airy costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the young poet’s vision broke up in this humorous manner. And, after all, it is less surprising that the Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book by a new young man, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of _Mariana in the South_, inspired by the landscape of the Provençal tour with Arthur Hallam. In consequence of Lockhart’s censures, or in deference to the maturer taste of the poet, _The Miller’s Daughter_ was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson’s domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in “minnows” where “fish” had been the reading, and where “trout” would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the rising trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the “reflex of a beauteous form.” “Every woman seems an angel at the water-side,” said “that good old angler, now with God,” Thomas Todd Stoddart, and so “the long and listless boy” found it to be. It is no wonder that the mother was “_slowly_ brought to yield consent to my desire.” The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of _Fatima_. The critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will note—

“O Love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro’ My lips,”

and will observe Mr Browning’s

“Once he kissed My soul out in a fiery mist.”

As to _Œnone_, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. “It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s _Judgment of Paris_,” says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which

“Quintus Calaber Somewhat lazily handled of old”

may have reached Tennyson’s mind from an older writer than Beattie. He is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek myth as with the lamented “Minstrel.” The form of 1833, greatly altered in 1842, contained such unlucky phrases as “cedar shadowy,” and “snowycoloured,” “marblecold,” “violet-eyed”—easy spoils of criticism. The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the significance of Œnone’s “I will not die alone,” which in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as narrated in Tennyson’s late piece, _The Death of Œnone_. The whole poem brings to mind the glowing hues of Titian and the famous Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera.

The allegory or moral of _The Palace of Art_ does not need explanation. Not many of the poems owe more to revision. The early stanza about Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and “Eastern Confutzee,” did undeniably remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of _The Groves of Blarney_.

“With statues gracing that noble place in, All haythen goddesses most rare, Petrarch, Plato, and Nebuchadnezzar, All standing naked in the open air.”

In the early version the Soul, being too much “up to date,”

“Lit white streams of dazzling gas,”

like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.

“Thus her intense, untold delight, In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound, Was flattered day and night.”

Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter’s experiments in gas, the “smell” gave him no “deep, untold delight,” and his “infamous review” was biassed by these circumstances.

The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediæval romance, and classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic idyll, of which _The May Queen_ is probably the most popular example. The “mysterious being,” conversant with “the spiritual world,” might have been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated them, and thereby did more to introduce himself to the wide English public than he could have done by a century of _Fatimas_ or _Lotos-Eaters_. On the other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be satisfied with pathos which in process of time has come to seem “obvious.” The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the laments of the Anthology, where we only know that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather commonplace.

“That good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,”

strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth—

“A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman.”

_The Lotos-Eaters_, of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet’s genius. A few plain verses of the _Odyssey_, almost bald in their reticence, are the _point de repère_ of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece,—one of the eternal possessions of song.

On the other hand, the opening of _The Dream of Fair Women_ was marred in 1833 by the grotesque introductory verses about “a man that sails in a balloon.” Young as Tennyson was, these freakish passages are a psychological marvel in the work of one who did not lack the saving sense of humour. The poet, wafted on the wing and “pinion that the Theban eagle bear,” cannot conceivably be likened to an aeronaut waving flags out of a balloon—except in a spirit of self-mockery which was not Tennyson’s. His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. It is probably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, in the verses _To J. S._ (James Spedding), Tennyson reproduces the noble speech on the warrior’s death which Sir Walter Scott places in the lips of the great Dundee: “It is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun, _that_ is all that is worth caring for,” the light which lingers eternally on the hills of Atholl. Tennyson’s lines are a close parallel:—

“His memory long will live alone In all our hearts, as mournful light That broods above the fallen sun, And dwells in heaven half the night.”

Though Tennyson disliked the exhibition of “the chips of the workshop,” we have commented on them, on the early readings of the early volumes. They may be regarded more properly as the sketches of a master than as “chips,” and do more than merely engage the idle curiosity of the fanatics of first editions. They prove that the poet was studious of perfection, and wisely studious, for his alterations, unlike those of some authors, were almost invariably for the better, the saner, the more mature in taste. The early readings are also worth notice, because they partially explain, by their occasionally fantastic and humourless character, the lack of early and general recognition of the poet’s genius. The native prejudice of mankind is not in favour of a new poet. Of new poets there are always so many, most of them bad, that nature has protected mankind by an armour of suspiciousness. The world, and Lockhart, easily found good reasons for distrusting this new claimant of the ivy and the bays: moreover, since about 1814 there had been a reaction against new poetry. The market was glutted. Scott had set everybody on reading, and too many on writing, novels. The great reaction of the century against all forms of literature except prose fiction had begun. Near the very date of Tennyson’s first volume Bulwer Lytton, as we saw, had frankly explained that he wrote novels because nobody would look at anything else. Tennyson had to overcome this universal, or all but universal, indifference to new poetry, and, after being silent for ten years, overcome it he did—a remarkable victory of art and of patient courage. Times were even worse for poets than to-day. Three hundred copies of the new volume were sold! But Tennyson’s friends were not puffers in league with pushing publishers.

Meanwhile the poet in 1833 went on quietly and undefeated with his work. He composed _The Gardener’s Daughter_, and was at work on the _Morte d’Arthur_, suppressed till the ninth year, on the Horatian plan. Many poems were produced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write them—in what uninspired hours. Unlike Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, and electricity—“cross-grained Muses,” these last.

It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam died. Unheralded by sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt from a serene sky. Tennyson’s and Hallam’s love had been “passing the love of women.” A blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. “Is this the end?” Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life—his friendship.

“That faith I fain would keep, That hope I’ll not forego: Eternal be the sleep— Unless to waken so,”