II

Tennyson’s genius was slow in maturing. The poems contributed by him to the volume of 1827, Poems by Two Brothers, are not without some slight promise, but are very far from indicating extraordinary powers. A great advance is discernible in Timbuctoo, but that Matthew Arnold should have discovered in it the germ of Tennyson’s future powers is probably to be attributed to the youth of the critic. Tennyson was in his twenty-second year when the Poems Chiefly Lyrical appeared, and what strikes us in these poems is certainly not what Arthur Hallam saw in them: much rather what Coleridge and Wilson discerned in them. They are the poems of a fragile and somewhat morbid young man in whose temper we seem to see a touch of Hamlet, a touch of Romeo and, more healthily, a touch of Mercutio. Their most promising characteristic is the versatility displayed. Thus we find Mariana side by side with the Supposed Confessions, the Ode to Memory with οἱ ῥέοντες, The Ballad of Oriana with The Dying Swan, Recollections of The Arabian Nights with The Poet. Their worst fault is affectation. Perhaps the utmost that can be said for them is that they display a fine but somewhat thin vein of original genius, after deducing what they owe to Coleridge, to Keats and to other poets. This is seen in the magical touches of description, in the exquisite felicity of expression and rhythm which frequently mark them, in the pathos and power of such a poem as Oriana, in the pathos and charm of such poems as Mariana and A Dirge, in the rich and almost gorgeous fancy displayed in The Recollections.

The poems of 1833 are much more ambitious and strike deeper notes. Here comes in for the first time that σπουδαιότης, that high seriousness which is one of Tennyson’s chief characteristics—we see it in The Palace of Art, in Œnone and in the verses To J. S. But in intrinsic merit the poems were no advance on their predecessors, for the execution was not equal to the design. The best, such as Œnone, A Dream of Fair Women, The Palace of Art, The Lady of Shalott—I am speaking of course of these poems in their first form—were full of extraordinary blemishes. The volume was degraded by pieces which were very unworthy of him, such as O Darling Room and the verses To Christopher North, and affectations of the worst kind deformed many, nay, perhaps the majority of the poems. But the capital defect lay in the workmanship. The diction is often languid and slipshod, sometimes quaintly affected, and we can never go far without encountering lines, stanzas, whole poems which cry aloud for the file. The power and charm of Tennyson’s poetry, even at its ripest, depend very largely, often mainly, on expression, and the couplet which he envied Browning,

The little more, and how much it is,
The little less, and what worlds away,

is strangely applicable to his own art. On a single word, on a subtle collocation, on a slight touch depend often his finest effects: “the little less” reduces him to mediocrity, “the little more” and he is with the masters. To no poetry would the application of Goethe’s test be, as a rule, more fatal—that the real poetic quality in poetry is that which remains when it has been translated literally into prose.

Whoever will compare the poems of 1832 with the same poems as they appeared in 1842 will see that the difference is not so much a difference in degree, but almost a difference in kind. In the collection of 1832 there were three gems, The Sisters, the lines To J. S. and The May Queen. Almost all the others which are of any value were, in the edition of 1842, carefully revised, and in some cases practically rewritten. If Tennyson’s career had closed in 1833 he would hardly have won a prominent place among the minor poets of the present century. The nine years which intervened between the publication of his second volume and the volumes of 1842 were the making of him, and transformed a mere dilettante into a master. Much has been said about the brutality of Lockhart’s review in the Quarterly. In some respects it was stupid, in some respects it was unjust, but of one thing there can be no doubt—it had a most salutary effect. It held up the mirror to weaknesses and deficiencies which, if Tennyson did not care to acknowledge to others, he must certainly have acknowledged to himself. It roused him and put him on his mettle. It was a wholesome antidote to the enervating flattery of coteries and “apostles” who were certainly talking a great deal of nonsense about him, as Arthur Hallam’s essay in the Englishman shows. During the next nine years he published nothing, with the exception of two unimportant contributions to certain minor periodicals.[[1]] But he was educating himself, saturating himself with all that is best in the poetry of Ancient Greece and Rome, of modern Italy, of Germany and of his own country, studying theology, metaphysics, natural history, geology, astronomy and travels, observing nature with the eye of a poet, a painter and a naturalist. Nor was he a recluse. He threw himself heartily into the life of his time, following with the keenest interest all the great political and social movements, the progress and effects of the Reform Bill, the troubles in Ireland, the troubles with the Colonies, the struggles between the Protectionists and the Free Traders, Municipal Reform, the advance of the democracy, Chartism, the popular education question. He travelled on the Continent, he travelled in Wales and Scotland, he visited most parts of England, not as an idle tourist, but as a student with note-book in hand. And he had been submitted also to the discipline which is of all disciplines the most necessary to the poet, and without which, as Goethe says, “he knows not the heavenly powers”: he had “ate his bread in sorrow”. The death of his father in 1831 had already brought him face to face, as he has himself expressed it, with the most solemn of all mysteries. In 1833 he had an awful shock in the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam, “an overwhelming sorrow which blotted out all joy from his life and made him long for death”. He had other minor troubles which contributed greatly to depress him,—the breaking up of the old home at Somersby, his own poverty and uncertain prospects, his being compelled in consequence to break off all intercourse with Miss Emily Selwood. It is possible that Love and Duty may have reference to this sorrow; it is certain that The Two Voices is autobiographical.

Such was his education between 1832 and 1842, and such the influences which were moulding him, while he was slowly evolving In Memoriam and the poems first published in the latter year. To the revision of the old poems he brought tastes and instincts cultivated by the critical study of all that was best in the poetry of the world, and more particularly by a familiarity singularly intimate and affectionate with the masterpieces of the ancient classics; he brought also the skill of a practised workman, for his diligence in production was literally that of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the sister art—nulla dies sine line’. Into the composition of the new poems all this entered. He was no longer a trifler and a Hedonist. As Spedding has said, his former poems betrayed “an over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses, a profusion of splendours, harmonies, perfumes, gorgeous apparel, luscious meals and drinks, and creature comforts which rather pall upon the sense, and make the glories of the outward world to obscure a little the world within”. Like his own Lady of Shalott, he had communed too much with shadows. But the serious poet now speaks. He appeals less to the ear and the eye, and more to the heart. The sensuous is subordinated to the spiritual and the moral. He deals immediately with the dearest concerns of man and of society. He has ceased to trifle. The σπουδαιότης, the high seriousness of the true poet, occasional before, now pervades and enters essentially into his work. It is interesting to note how many of these poems have direct didactic purpose. How solemn is the message delivered in such poems as The Palace of Art and The Vision of Sin, how noble the teaching in Love and Duty, in Œnone, in Godiva, in Ulysses; to how many must such a poem as The Two Voices have brought solace and light; how full of salutary lessons are the political poems You ask me, why, though ill at ease and Love thou thy Land, and how noble is their expression! And, even where the poems are less directly didactic, it is such refreshment as busy life needs to converse with them, so pure, so wholesome, so graciously human is their tone, so tranquilly beautiful is their world. Who could lay down The Miller’s Daughter, Dora, The Golden Year, The Gardener’s Daughter, The Talking Oak, Audley Court, The Day Dream without something of the feeling which Goethe felt when he first laid down The Vicar of Wakefield? In the best lyrics in these volumes, such as Break, Break, and Move Eastward, Happy Earth, the most fastidious of critics must recognise flawless gems. In the two volumes of 1842 Tennyson carried to perfection all that was best in his earlier poems, and displayed powers of which he may have given some indication in his cruder efforts, but which must certainly have exceeded the expectation of the most sanguine of his rational admirers. These volumes justly gave him the first place among the poets of his time, and that supremacy he maintained—in the opinion of most—till the day of his death. It would be absurd to contend that Tennyson’s subsequent publications added nothing to the fame which will be secured to him by these poems. But this at least is certain, that, taken with In Memorium, they represent the crown and flower of his achievement. What is best in them he never excelled and perhaps never equalled. We should be the poorer, and much the poorer, for the loss of anything which he produced subsequently, it is true; but would we exchange half a dozen of the best of these poems or a score of the best sections of In Memoriam for all that he produced between 1850 and his death?

[1] In The Keepsake, “St. Agnes’ Eve”; in The Tribute, “Stanzas”: “Oh! that ’twere possible”. Between 1831 and 1832 he had contributed to The Gem three, “No more,” “Anacreontics,” and “A Fragment”; in The Englishman!s Magazine, a Sonnet; in The Yorkshire Literary Annual, lines, “There are three things that fill my heart with sighs”; in Friendship’s Offering, lines, “Me my own fate”.

III

The poems of 1842 naturally divide themselves into seven groups:—