Ever moulded by the lips of man.”
THE POET’S RANGE OF KNOWLEDGE
The recent appearance (October, 1913) of a notable volume of Tennyson’s poems, introduced by a Memoir and concluding with the poet’s own notes, may well serve as the text for some remarks on his poems generally. The volume bound in green cloth is priced at 10s. 6d. The Memoir is somewhat abbreviated from the two interesting volumes published by his son in 1897, which appeared again as the first four volumes of Messrs. Macmillan’s fine twelve-volume edition of 1898. There are, however, a few additions, notably a letter from the Master of Trinity, Cambridge, telling how he once, years ago, asked Dr. Thompson, the Master, whether he could say, not from later evidence, but from his recollection of what he thought at the time, which of the two friends had the greater intellect, Hallam or Tennyson. “Oh, Tennyson,” he said at once, with strong emphasis, as if the matter was not open to doubt. This is very high praise indeed, for Gladstone said that Hallam was far ahead of anyone at Eton in his day, and Monckton Milnes thought him the only man at Cambridge to whom he “bowed in conscious inferiority in all things.” The Notes first appeared in the very pleasant “Annotated Edition” edited also by Hallam Lord Tennyson within the last five years. The present generation can never know the delight of getting each of those little green volumes which came out between ’32 and ’55, and sequels to which kept following till ’92. But for general purposes it is far more convenient to have a one-volume edition, such as we have had for some time now. This new edition, however, with its Memoir, gives us what, as the years go by, is more and more valuable, enabling us to read the poet in his verses and to know what manner of man he was, and how his environment affected him at the different stages of his life. The Notes add an interest, and though it is seldom that in any but the In Memoriam Cantos any explanation is needed to poems that are so clear and so easily intelligible, one gains information and finds oneself here and there let into the author’s secrets, which is always pleasant. The book runs to over a thousand pages, and is so beautifully bound that it lies open at any page you choose. There is an interesting appendix to the Notes, giving the music to “The Silent Voices,” composed by Lady Tennyson and arranged for four voices by Dr. Bridge for Lord Tennyson’s funeral at the Abbey, October 12, 1892. Also a previously unpublished poem of his later years, entitled “Reticence.” She is called the half-sister of Silence, and is thus beautifully described:—
“Not like Silence shall she stand,
Finger-lipt, but with right hand
Moving toward her lip, and there
Hovering, thoughtful, poised in air.”
Then comes a facsimile of the poet’s MS. of “Crossing the Bar,” finally, besides the usual index of first lines, the book ends with an index to In Memoriam, and, what we have always wanted, an index to the songs.
Undoubtedly in the future this new edition will be the Tennyson for the library shelf, and a very complete and compact volume it is. Personally, I like the little old green volumes, but if I were now recommending an edition not in one volume, I would say, “Have the Eversley or Annotated Edition in nine volumes, which exactly reproduces the page and type of those old original volumes with the added advantage of the Notes.” It is hardly to be expected that the spell with which Tennyson bound all English-speaking people for three generations should not in a measure be relaxed, but though we have a fuller chorus of singers than ever before, and an unusually appreciative public, the attempt so constantly made to decry Tennyson has no effect on those who have for years found in him a charm which no poet has surpassed, and, indeed, it will be long before a poet arises who has, as Sir Norman Lockyer observes, “such a wide range of knowledge and so unceasing an interest in the causes of things and the working out of Nature’s laws, combined with such accuracy of observation and exquisite felicity of language.” Let me give one more criticism, and this time by a noted scholar, Mr. A. Sidgwick, who speaks of his “inborn instinct for the subtle power of language and for musical sound; that feeling for beauty in phrase and thought, and that perfection of form which, taken all together, we call poetry.” That perfection was the result of labour as well as of instinct. He had an ear which never played him false, hence he was a master of melody and metre, and he was never in a hurry to publish until he had got each line and each word right. “I think it wisest,” he wrote to one of his American admirers, “for a man to do his work in the world as quietly and as well as he can, without much heeding the praise or dispraise.” He was a lover of the classics, and in addressing Virgil on the nineteenth centenary of his death, as quoted above, he himself alludes to this. Without being what we call a great scholar, in his classic poems he is hard to beat, while in his translations of Homer he certainly has no equal. Then in his experiments in classic metres, whether in the “Metre of Catullus” or in the Alcaics in praise of Milton, his perfect accuracy is best understood if we turn to the similar experiments by living poets, who never go far without a blunder, at least none that I have ever read do.
THE DIALECT POEMS