Alfred Tennyson | Page 6

lines in
Pope's measure. At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott's manner,
of some six thousand lines. He "never felt himself more truly inspired,"
for the sense of "inspiration" (as the late Mr Myers has argued in an
essay on the "Mechanism of Genius") has little to do with the actual
value of the product. At fourteen Tennyson wrote a drama in blank
verse. A chorus from this play (as one guesses), a piece from "an
unpublished drama written very early," is published in the volume of
1830:-
"The varied earth, the moving heaven, The rapid waste of roving sea,
The fountain-pregnant mountains riven To shapes of wildest anarchy,
By secret fire and midnight storms That wander round their windy
cones."
These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical transcript,

"the varied earth," daedala tellus. There is the geological interest in the
forces that shape the hills. There is the use of the favourite word
"windy," and later in the piece -
"The troublous autumn's SALLOW gloom."
The young poet from boyhood was original in his manner.
Byron made him blase at fourteen. Then Byron died, and Tennyson
scratched on a rock "Byron is dead," on "a day when the whole world
seemed darkened for me." Later he considered Byron's poetry "too
much akin to rhetoric." "Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator
in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is endlessly clever, and
is now unduly depreciated." He "did give the world another heart and
new pulses, and so we are kept going." But "he was dominated by
Byron till he was seventeen, when he put him away altogether."
In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he endured for a while at
school at Louth; despite bullying from big boys and masters, Tennyson
would "shout his verses to the skies." "Well, Arthur, I mean to be
famous," he used to say to one of his brothers. He observed nature very
closely by the brook and the thundering sea- shores: he was never a
sportsman, and his angling was in the manner of the lover of The
Miller's Daughter. He was seventeen (1826) when Poems by Two
Brothers (himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the
date 1827. These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover,
nothing really Tennysonian. What he had done in his own manner was
omitted, "being thought too much out of the common for the public
taste." The young poet had already saving common-sense, and
understood the public. Fragments of the true gold are found in the
volume of 1830, others are preserved in the Biography. The ballad
suggested by The Bride of Lammermoor was not unworthy of Beddoes,
and that novel, one cannot but think, suggested the opening situation in
Maud, where the hero is a modern Master of Ravenswood in his
relation to the rich interloping family and the beautiful daughter. To
this point we shall return. It does not appear that Tennyson was
conscious in Maud of the suggestion from Scott, and the coincidence
may be merely accidental.

The Lover's Tale, published in 1879, was mainly a work of the poet's
nineteenth year. A few copies had been printed for friends. One of
these, with errors of the press, and without the intended alterations, was
pirated by an unhappy man in 1875. In old age Tennyson brought out
the work of his boyhood. "It was written before I had ever seen Shelley,
though it is called Shelleyan," he said; and indeed he believed that his
work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the manner of
Thomson and of Scott. The only things in The Lover's Tale which
would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene
of the story, the character of the versification, and the extraordinary
luxuriance and exuberance of the imagery. {2} As early as 1868
Tennyson heard that written copies of The Lover's Tale were in
circulation. He then remarked, as to the exuberance of the piece:
"Allowance must be made for abundance of youth. It is rich and full,
but there are mistakes in it. . . . The poem is the breath of young love."
How truly Tennysonian the manner is may be understood even from
the opening lines, full of the original cadences which were to become
so familiar:-
"Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff, Filling with purple gloom
the vacancies Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas Hung in
mid-heaven, and half way down rare sails, White as white clouds,
floated from sky to sky."
The narrative in parts one and two (which alone were written in youth)
is so choked with images and descriptions as to be almost obscure. It is
the story, practically, of