BOOKS

A hen in the sunshine

A. N. Wilson The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson I (1821-1850) Edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon Jr (Clarendon Press Oxford £17.50) 6 Break not, 0 woman's heart, but still

endure!' Tennyson wrote to his monarch. One imagines the shade of Prince. Albert, like Bishop Proudie, jumping out of his chair at hearing the wife of his bosom called a woman; but one imagines wrongly. The night before he accepted the Laureateship, (which he did after much in- decision because someone had told him, I became Poet Laureate I should always when I dined out be offered the liver-wing of a fowl'), Tennyson dreamed of Prince Albert kissing him, which made him think, very kind but very German'. When they were near neighbours on the Isle of Wight, the two men developed an easy, natural friendship and when the Queen was widow- ed, she turned to Tennyson almost as to a guru. Unlike our own monarch, Queen Vic- toria felt free to make friends from widely- differing social worlds.

The offer of the Laureateship came to Tennyson at the end of this first volume of his letters in December 1850. He was 41. He had finally got round to marrying Emily Seltwood, though it was 14 years since that Patient girl had first fallen in love with him and he had 'murmured (like a hen in the sunshine) lines and half lines of some Poem', He had just published In Memoriam. Otherwise, he had done very little with life. He had more or less avoided becoming a drug addict, the fate of his madder brothers. He had been the victim of depressions which almost gave the lie to his brother's assertion, 'I am Septimus; the Most morbid of the Tennysons'. He had had a spell as a voluntary patient in a lunatic asylum. He had made occasional visits abroad. But for the most part, to judge from these letters, in the 20 years Which elapsed after he came down, from Cambridge, he mainly mooned about in London. He moved from one cheap lodging

to the next; he worried (unnecessarily as it ha — Pvened) about money; he drank and smoked far too much; he hung about in bars. This was the man that Queen Victoria Chose not merely as her Laureate but as her close personal friend.

Even if the present monarch is a discern- ing poetry-lover (to judge from the 'poem' she read during last year's Christmas broad- cast one would suspect not) would she be able to make friends with Tennyson if he. were alive today? Tennyson's existence up to the age of 40 was not unlike the 'Low Life' column of the Spectator. Can we im- agine the taxi lurching down the Mall to

Buckingham Palace from the Coach and Horses in Greek Street? If not, it is not the Queen's fault. It is ours. We may be fouller-mouthed than the Victorians, and possibly less chaste. But we are unques- tionably stuffier.

For the hoary social curse Gets hoarier and hoarier, And it stinks a trifle worse

Than in

The days of Queen Victoria.

For all our supposed fondness for royal walkabouts and films of the Duke of Edin- burgh tinkering with the portable Bar-B-Q, we want the Royal Family to be unap- proachably mysterious, the sort of people who need servants to go and buy their wine- gums. It is the contemporaries of Queen Elizabeth II, and not those of Queen Vic- toria, who would jump out of their chairs at hearing the wife of Prince Philip's bosom called a woman.

Perhaps, however, things are getting bet- ter. Tennyson's reputation has never been higher, since his death, than it is today. Prudes will always protect themselves against the knowledge of how stuffy they are by sniggering. Only puritans like dirty jokes. We no longer snigger at Tennyson. Taught by Bloomsbury to lark about when the teacher's back was turned, two generations of 20th-century readers felt nervous in Tennyson's presence. Few peo- ple over the age of 50 approach his poetry without a foolish sense that they might laugh when they come upon lines like 'God made himself an awful rose of dawn' or 'My Willy 'ill rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment 'ill sound'. It does not occur to younger readers to laugh at these lines; they recognise Tennyson as the really great poet that he was.

He was much too idle to be a great letter- writer. This volume calls itself The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson but 140 pages out of 346 are not by Tennyson at all. It is easy to see why. He did not bother to record the great events of his life (few as they were) so that if the book is to have any narrative coherence, it is necessary to read other peo- ple's accounts of the death of Arthur Hallam or of Tennyson's own wedding. Some people will wonder whether it was worth, printing such hastily scribbled notes, as this: 'Dear Mrs Dickens, I am leaving London today for the North: otherwise I should have been most happy to celebrate your boy's birthday with you. Kindest regards to Dickens. Ever yours, A. Tenny- son' ., At least it was addressed to the wife of a famous man. There is less interest in 'My dear Keyser, I shall be very glad to see you next Tuesday. Ever yours, A. Tenny- son'. (If you want to read that in manuscript, by the way, you must go to the University of Kentucky), Others will regret that such a substantial amount of space at the beginning of the volume is given to the rather tedious letters written by other members of the Tennyson family.

But I did not regret this because the con- trast between the pompous verbiage of (say) his brother Frederic's letters and Tennyson's own is so very informative. 'You have probably heard before this frOm other sources', Frederic wrote, 'the sad in- telligence of the melancholy death of our dear friend Hallam, and the consequent af- fliction into which our family, especially Emily, has been plunged'. It is the sort of letter of which Podsnap might have been proud. Tennyson would have been in- capable of writing such flannel.

The striking thing about his letters is their language. It is a true test of a great poet that his voice is unlike any other's. Tennyson's distinctive tone is present from the very beginning. It was not learnt from anyone. At the age of 12 he was writing to an aunt, enthusing about Samson Agonistes. '1 think it is beautiful, particularly, "0 dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of Noon" ': the line from Milton's poem that is most Tennyson- ian, and which he would have singled out at any period of his life. To another aunt, in his first year as an undergraduate, he writes, 'I am sitting Owl-like and solitary in my rooms (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles) the hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel, the shouts of drunken Gown and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur'. No reader of his mature poetry, if presented with that sentence 'unseen' would have a moment's doubt about its authorship. There is always a vigour and directness about hiS speech, whether he is complaining about being marooned in quarantine off the Dutch coast ('good reasons have I to be sulky, John; as plenty as blackberries; I am

bugbitten, flybitten, fleabitten, and hunger- bitten') or whether he is remembering a silent drunken evening with a friend ('look- ing smoky babies in each other's eyes') or witnessing the Solemn Exposition of the underwear of Our Lady at Aix-la-Chapelle (`Truly I must say that the Virgin wore marvellously foul linen').

This book is expensive, but there is enough re-readable matter here to make it almost worth the price. Like all such enter- pikes now-a-days, it is over-annotated, but the industry of the editors must be com- mended, and even, on occasion, their wit. I liked the footnote on Stephen Spring Rice which said he was equally at home 'with the fraction of the population not related to him by blood or marriage'.