Alfred Tennyson | Page 8

for poetry in
the world as seen through microscope and telescope, and as developed
through "aeonian" processes of evolution. In a notebook, mixed with
Greek, is a poem on the Moon--not the moon of Selene, "the orbed
Maiden," but of astronomical science. In Memoriam recalls the
conversations on labour and politics, discussions of the age of the
Reform Bill, of rick-burning (expected to "make taters cheaper"), and
of Catholic emancipation; also the emancipation of such negroes as had
not yet tasted the blessings of freedom. In politics Tennyson was what
he remained, a patriot, a friend of freedom, a foe of disorder. His
politics, he said, were those "of Shakespeare, Bacon, and every sane
man." He was one of the Society of Apostles, and characteristically
contributed an essay on Ghosts. Only the preface survives: it is not
written in a scientific style; but bids us "not assume that any vision IS
baseless." Perhaps the author went on to discuss "veridical
hallucinations," but his ideas about these things must be considered
later.
It was by his father's wish that Tennyson competed for the English
prize poem. The theme, Timbuctoo, was not inspiring. Thackeray wrote
a good parody of the ordinary prize poem in Pope's metre:-
"I see her sons the hill of glory mount, And sell their sugars on their
own account; Prone to her feet the prostrate nations come, Sue for her
rice and barter for her rum."
Tennyson's work was not much more serious: he merely patched up an
old piece, in blank verse, on the battle of Armageddon. The poem is not
destitute of Tennysonian cadence, and ends, not inappropriately, with
"All was night." Indeed, all WAS night.
An ingenious myth accounts for Tennyson's success: At Oxford, says
Charles Wordsworth, the author was more likely to have been
rusticated than rewarded. But already (1829) Arthur Hallam told Mr
Gladstone that Tennyson "promised fair to be the greatest poet of our

generation, perhaps of our century."
In 1830 Tennyson published the first volume of which he was sole
author. Browning's Pauline was of the year 1833. It was the very dead
hours of the Muses. The great Mr Murray had ceased, as one despairing
of song, to publish poetry. Bulwer Lytton, in the preface to Paul
Clifford (1830), announced that poetry, with every other form of
literature except the Novel, was unremunerative and unread. Coleridge
and Scott were silent: indeed Sir Walter was near his death;
Wordsworth had shot his bolt, though an arrow or two were left in the
quiver. Keats, Shelley, and Byron were dead; Milman's brief vogue was
departing. It seemed as if novels alone could appeal to readers, so great
a change in taste had been wrought by the sixteen years of Waverley
romances. The slim volume of Tennyson was naturally neglected,
though Leigh Hunt reviewed it in the Tatler. Hallam's comments in the
Englishman's Magazine, though enthusiastic (as was right and natural),
were judicious. "The author imitates no one." Coleridge did not read all
the book, but noted "things of a good deal of beauty. The misfortune is
that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what
metre is." As Tennyson said in 1890, "So I, an old man, who get a
poem or poems every day, might cast a casual glance at a book, and
seeing something which I could not scan or understand, might possibly
decide against the book without further consideration." As a rule, the
said books are worthless. The number of versifiers makes it hard,
indeed, for the poet to win recognition. One little new book of rhyme is
so like another, and almost all are of so little interest!
The rare book that differs from the rest has a bizarrerie with its
originality, and in the poems of 1830 there was, assuredly, more than
enough of the bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epithets,
and words like "tendriltwine" seemed provokingly affected. A kind of
lusciousness, like that of Keats when under the influence of Leigh Hunt,
may here and there be observed. Such faults as these catch the
indifferent eye when a new book is first opened, and the volume of
1830 was probably condemned by almost every reader of the previous
generation who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of fifty-six pieces
only twenty-three were reprinted in the two volumes of 1842, which

won for Tennyson the general recognition of the world of letters. Five
or six of the pieces then left out were added as Juvenilia in the collected
works of 1871, 1872. The whole mass deserves the attention of
students of the poet's development.
This early volume may be said to contain, in the germ, all the great
original qualities of Tennyson, except the humour of his rural studies
and the elaboration