Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 5

the poems. But the capital defect lay in the workmanship. The diction is often languid and slipshod, sometimes quaintly affected, and we can never go far without encountering lines, stanzas, whole poems which cry aloud for the file. The power and charm of Tennyson's poetry, even at its ripest, depend very largely, often mainly, on expression, and the couplet which he envied Browning,
The little more, and how much it is,?The little less, and what worlds away,
is strangely applicable to his own art. On a single word, on a subtle collocation, on a slight touch depend often his finest effects: "the little less" reduces him to mediocrity, "the little more" and he is with the masters. To no poetry would the application of Goethe's test be, as a rule, more fatal--that the real poetic quality in poetry is that which remains when it has been translated literally into prose.
Whoever will compare the poems of 1832 with the same poems as they appeared in 1842 will see that the difference is not so much a difference in degree, but almost a difference in kind. In the collection of 1832 there were three gems, 'The Sisters', the lines 'To J. S.' and 'The May Queen'. Almost all the others which are of any value were, in the edition of 1842, carefully revised, and in some cases practically rewritten. If Tennyson's career had closed in 1833 he would hardly have won a prominent place among the minor poets of the present century. The nine years which intervened between the publication of his second volume and the volumes of 1842 were the making of him, and transformed a mere dilettante into a master. Much has been said about the brutality of Lockhart's review in the 'Quarterly'. In some respects it was stupid, in some respects it was unjust, but of one thing there can be no doubt--it had a most salutary effect. It held up the mirror to weaknesses and deficiencies which, if Tennyson did not care to acknowledge to others, he must certainly have acknowledged to himself. It roused him and put him on his mettle. It was a wholesome antidote to the enervating flattery of coteries and "apostles" who were certainly talking a great deal of nonsense about him, as Arthur Hallam's essay in the 'Englishman' shows. During the next nine years he published nothing, with the exception of two unimportant contributions to certain minor periodicals.[1] But he was educating himself, saturating himself with all that is best in the poetry of Ancient Greece and Rome, of modern Italy, of Germany and of his own country, studying theology, metaphysics, natural history, geology, astronomy and travels, observing nature with the eye of a poet, a painter and a naturalist. Nor was he a recluse. He threw himself heartily into the life of his time, following with the keenest interest all the great political and social movements, the progress and effects of the Reform Bill, the troubles in Ireland, the troubles with the Colonies, the struggles between the Protectionists and the Free Traders, Municipal Reform, the advance of the democracy, Chartism, the popular education question. He travelled on the Continent, he travelled in Wales and Scotland, he visited most parts of England, not as an idle tourist, but as a student with note-book in hand. And he had been submitted also to the discipline which is of all disciplines the most necessary to the poet, and without which, as Goethe says, "he knows not the heavenly powers": he had "ate his bread in sorrow". The death of his father in 1831 had already brought him face to face, as he has himself expressed it, with the most solemn of all mysteries. In 1833 he had an awful shock in the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam, "an overwhelming sorrow which blotted out all joy from his life and made him long for death". He had other minor troubles which contributed greatly to depress him,--the breaking up of the old home at Somersby, his own poverty and uncertain prospects, his being compelled in consequence to break off all intercourse with Miss Emily Selwood. It is possible that 'Love and Duty' may have reference to this sorrow; it is certain that 'The Two Voices' is autobiographical.
Such was his education between 1832 and 1842, and such the influences which were moulding him, while he was slowly evolving 'In Memoriam' and the poems first published in the latter year. To the revision of the old poems he brought tastes and instincts cultivated by the critical study of all that was best in the poetry of the world, and more particularly by a familiarity singularly intimate and affectionate with the masterpieces of the ancient classics; he brought also the skill of a practised workman, for his diligence in production