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THE 'MAKING OF TENNYSON.*
It is difficult to realise that nearly a hundred years have passed since Tennyson' was born., He seems still so fresh and of our time and is so inuch' in our hands. Yet so it is. In little more than a twelvemonth the great centenary will be upon us, the hundredth anniversary of that marvellous year in which Darwin and Tennyson, Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Men- delssohn And Kinglake, Edward FitzGerald and Mrs. Barrett Browning, to name no others, all came into the world. Sb far away it seems, and yet so near. For no hundred years have been so full, so crowded with movement and event, with change and discovery, as those which separate the epoch of Corunna from our own day. The steamship appeared in 1807, just a century ago. The railway was to come later. The "airy navies" and the "pilots of the purple twilight" have not yet been fully born, but may well be so by 1909. The French war exerted a retarding influence' on the "thoughts that shake mankind," but they too were soon to be in rapid ferment. It was in the year of Corunna, 1809, that Tennyson was born. He Was six years old when Waterloo closed the old period, and "the roar of Hotigonmont," as he has finely said, left England "mightiest of all peoples under heaven." His boyhood' lay in the following decade,' and in• the next, again, he went to Cambridge. The real beginning of the modern era in England is best placed in the two or three years round 1830, the period happily and rightly styled the "Young England period," the period of the struggle for the Reform Bill. It was in these years that Tennyson's first poems, those included in the little volume before us, were published,—namely, in the winter of 1832-33.
The "Early Poems" of Tennyson, how delicious they are !
Many of them would have their charm if we knew no more about them than we do of so many of the great classical pieces of antiquity, and, for the matter of that, of not a few modern pieces too. "The Poet" and "The Poet's Mind," "The Ballad of Oriana," " CEnone," the lines "To J. S.," especially the two concluding stanzas, these last like what they so much resemble, some epitaphic epigram from the Greek Anthology,—would have their value and appeal if we merely knew the author's name, nay, indeed, if they were like so many of the best numbers in the Anthology, anonymous, and of uncertain date. They belong to all time, and though it may be interesting to know this, it imports not specially for their meaning when or where they were written. But there are others to which an additional charm is given by knowing their occasion or their setting, even if they have become of general application. And others yet again contain allusions, hard to discover certainly, or passages of difficult or ambiguous meaning. Here, as with all classics, the labour of the commentator and annotator finds its opportunity. And the commentator and annotator have long since, as everybody knows, been busy with Tenny- son. Their lueubra.tions have indeed been both the cause and justification, if justification were needed, of the little book before us, and of the edition of his works annotated by the poet himself, of which it is the first volume. Tennyson himself would have preferred, as is shown by the few highly character- istic words prefixed by him to these notes, to leave his poems to tell their own Story without note or Comment. He did not like to act showman to his own creations. Yet there are good precedents. About the ancients we do not know much, but Sophocles, we are told, argued with a. schoolmaster in. defence of one of his epithets. Dante goes much further. In an interesting passage in the Consito he, so to speak, writes a poem on the blackboard for us, and then dissects and analyses, and explains and justifies, each portion, and gives a demonstration of his art.
Anyhow, it is 'well and for our gain that Tennyson was forced into doing what he has here done, and it is appropriate. For Tennyson is in more senses than one suited to be a model poet. Not that he is so in the somewhat invidious sense of presenting academic propriety, or a perfection, in his own phrase, "Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null."
• The Works of Tennyson. Annotated : Poems. I Edited by !fallen). Lord Tennyson. '' The Everaley Series." London Macmillan and Co [4a. net.) Finished as is his workmanship, unerring as is his artistio instinct, he in no way runs that risk. But with Tennyson, for the first time in literary history, we have the opportunity of knowing all that we ought to know about a great poet,—about his life, his circumstances, his friends, the sources, so far as they can be indicated, of his inspiration, his milieu and atmosphere, his method of working. We know a good deal about Dante, we know more about Goethe, we know still mole about Tennyson, and what we know, we know accurately, con- secutively, and in proportion. The Life gave us the general background and outline, the large, broad statement and presentation. These notes supply the details and minutiae. They are thus of great interest in the history of scholarship. They illustrate both the success and the failure of the ordinary commentator. It is as though some Egyptian papyrus were to be discovered, giving beyond a doubt Sophocles's own interpretation and explanation of his meaning, and of the genesis of his poetry, preserved by one of his poetic sons; or as though Virgirs confidential secretary had written down for us his table-talk, and their private discussions of his rhythm, his diction, his allusions, and these had been unearthed in some monastic lumber-room. On the whole, it is satisfactory to note that in important matters the ordinary commentator is so often confirmed. But he has missed many- points, his perspective is frequently wrong, and he has discovered some meanings and ever so many allusions, which were never intended. When these "Early Poems" were written, Tennyson knew well his own beloved Lincolnshire, both " wold " and lowland, the fresh-water "fen" and the salt-water "marsh." He knew Cambridge, of course, and her country too. • But he had been further afield. He had made the memorable and romantic expedition with Arthur Hallam to the Pyrenees, and seen there real Southern mountain scenery, and he had
travelled with the same friend to the Rhine. •
These form the background of his early verse, and colour and inform it. He had studied the ancient classics widely and deeply; he had worked seriously at the modern, in particular perusing, in company with Arthur Hallam, Italian poetry and Greek and German philosophy. He had informed himself, both through books and by observation, in science, more particularly natural history and astronomy. He had read, and read as a student, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, but, what is more, he possessed what for those days seems an unusual acquaintance with the older English literature. He used to " spout " to his Cambridge friends the old ballads, like those of "Clerk Saunders" and of fair "Helen of Kirk- connel." He had drunk deeply of that well-head of the Romantic revival, that veritable "Fountain of Jouvence," to be rediscovered later by the Preraphaelites, by Rossetti and Burne-Jones and William Morris, Sir Thomas Makny's Morte d'Arthur. He had debated questions scientific, artistic, social, and political with his Cambridge friends,—with the sage Spedding, the mercurial Houghton; Trench and Alford, the sacred poets; Thompson, the fastidious and scornful scholar ; "Old Brooks," the "man of humorous-melancholy mark" ; Kemble, the " soldier-priest " ; Blakesley, the "clear-beaded friend " ; above- all, with the "master bowman" of their debates, the ideal Hallam. He had seen glimpses of his future bride, an " Oread of the woodland ways," or a happy bridesmaid at her sister's wedding with his brother.
All these influences appear in these poems. But the effect of the notes is to show bow vague and general they all were, bow much more the poet was than his surroundings, or his "sources." To invert the old criticism, if there is much in these poems of Homer and Virgil, of Dante and Shakespeare, there is more that Is merely Homeric or Virgilian, Dantesque or Shakespearean, and there is far more that is the poet's own. It is natural for a young and studious and reverent mind to imitate. Only gradually does it gain confidence and come into its own. So with Tennyson. The obvious allusions to, the translations or paraphrases from, Homer or Virgil, Catullus or Horace, discovered by the critics, are naturally often con- firmed. But the debt to the classics is far more general than specific. And the same is the ease with the debt to Nature. "The May Queen" is Lincolnshire inland; "Locksley Hall" is Lincolnshire sea-coast ; " CEnone" draws on the scenery of the Pyrenees. But the "melded grange" is no particular grange, the "Mill" is no particular mill, just as the Somersby brook often alluded to is not the famous "Brook "of the poem which bears that name. "Break, break, break," has no doubt the atmosphere and the setting of Clevedon and the Severn Sea, and Bristol may be the "haven under the hill"; but the poem was not written amid these Western scenes, but at five o'clock in the morning in a Lincolnshire lane.
Such is-a true poet, and so he works. Such is poetry, so is it, and so is it not, made. Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire. But of more moment is it that he was also born in his own "golden clime, with golden stars above." He read certain books, he saw such-and-such people, but he found his "sources" mainly in himself. A few—Spedding, Maurice, Arthur Hallam, later his own wife—affected him deeply, and through him his poetry. But even he cannot tell us if be would, he would not if he could, how everything, how most of the best things in his poetry, came to him. None the lass, in its humbler way, what he does tell us here is of large and lasting interest, and this little volume is a genuine addition to literature and criticism.
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