started, their proprietors wanted names to attract, and they paid the Laureate a guinea a line for some weak kickshaws: I stood on a tower, in the wet, When the old year and the new year met, and a weak story about a City clerk, which were hardly worth printing. The magazines did themselves good as regards advertising, but much harm to the Laureate. In 1830 the Laureate published poems, chiefly lyrical, with prose notes full of egotism, which were properly laughed at, and since then, it is said, Tennyson has abandoned prose for ever. Yes, Tennyson is a greatly successful, but he is not a great poet. The next age will surely reverse the verdict of this. He is sugar-sweet, pretty-pretty, full of womanly talk and feminine stuff. Lilian, Dora, Clara, Emmeline 1-you can count up thirty such pretty names, but you cannot count any great poem of the Laureate's. No, he is no great poet. Mr Tennyson has been very discreet, and a very good Court poet,—for a manufactured article really none better; but he is like the lady who did not want to 'look frightful when dead,' and so put on the paint and the fucus, and he will take no deep hold of the world. What did sweet Will Shakespeare do? Did he not say that he had gored mine own thoughts; Sold cheap what is most dear, And made myself a motley to the view. Did he not give us blood and passion with his poetry? But says Tennyson: 'Nor can it suit me to forget' that I am admired by all young ladies, and am a Laureate. Further he adds, I count it crime To mourn for any overmuch. And posterity will count it folly to place a half-hearted and polished rhymster amongst her shining great ones, who were fellows with poverty and disrespect in this life, and who learnt in suffering that they might teach in song." Tennyson could afford to disregard "criticism" of this character. His best answer to such censors was "silence when they rave"; yet such outbursts taught him that Sing thou low or loud or sweet, All at all points thou canst not meet, 1 Adeline is no doubt intended. What is true at last will tell : Some too high-no fault of thine Hold thine own and work thy will! These lines from the last volume might almost be the poet's answer to the critics, who could not "place him well" at the beginning, who misunderstood him at many stages of his life, but who found in the end that the man who "held his own and worked his will" was the victor over all. CHAPTER XVI. LABOR LIMÆ: SUPPRESSED AND REVISED POEMS. "And here the Singer for his art Not all in vain may plead, 'The Song that nerves a nation's heart, Is in itself a deed.' -Epilogue. TENNYSON'S suppressed poems, and his constant revision, curtailment, and extension of those retained and published, are a study in themselves. He composed slowly and laboriously, and as a rule had a verse completely shaped in his mind before he committed it to paper. Once it was written out he set about polishing it, finding new places for words, new words for places, and making change upon change until not infrequently the original disappeared entirely, and the whole verse was recast. His favourite mode of composition was to walk about in his garden, smoking vigorously, and revolving his ideas until they took shape. At such times he was unapproachable. When engaged on a sustained work he would lock himself in his, study, and neither be heard nor seen for days at a time. His love of revision was almost a mania, and it was one of the tasks of his life to Add and alter, many times, Till all be ripe and rotten. His caligraphy was quaint and neat, the letters being distinct, small, and Greek-like, and to the expert revealing the love of exactness, minuteness, and care of the writer. No hurried, passionate, excitable man could have written every word with such evident control and restraint. Byron, who always composed in a fever, sent illegible scrawls to the printer, but Tennyson's manuscripts were models of picturesque neatness and legibility. The interpolations and corrections were not very numerous; alterations were usually made at a much later period. Yet even at this stage the labor lima was sometimes evident, as, for example, in the manuscript of the cycle of songs The Window. In the "copy" there is a verse of eight lines scored through which has never appeared in any published edition, and there are also autograph corrections of seventeen lines, while six, left untouched, now differ from the printed form. Whether this is true art or not need not now be discussed. Tennyson, at all events, could claim as an example Virgil, who Would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes. It is known that the Eneid was once twenty times longer than Virgil left it, and it was by years of paring, erasure, and condensation that it was brought to perfection; and Virgil spent three whole years, not in composing, but in revising the five or six hundred verses of his Pastorals. After this we need not blame Tennyson for spending more years in improving his poems than in writing them. But the deviations in text are full of suggestion and interest, and give us an insight into the poet's methods, his self-criticism, and his development. No one profited more by criticism than Tennyson, and if the harsh strictures of the Quarterly reviewer and Christopher North need any justification, that justification will best be found in Tennyson's own amendments. The poet wrote at one time and another positive absurdities. I doubt whether more ridiculous lines could be found than The Skipping Rope, or more childish lines than O Darling Room. Not only were there incongruities of thought in these early compositions, but in not a few the rhymes were bad and the metre imperfect. Remembering how careful Tennyson was in after years, and that not a defective rhyme or a false quantity exists in his poems as we now know them, we can simply view with amazement the stupidities and blunders of which he was once guilty. "Regarded as a crop of wild oats," said Spedding, " Mr Tennyson's first collection of poems, as originally published, cannot but be accounted a production of unusual promise. The natural faults of youth-exuberance, prodigality, lightness of heart and head, ingenuity wasted upon nothing, the want of sustained effort and a determined course, together with some vanities and fopperies--it may well afford to be charged with. The untried genius needed to be assured of its powers by putting them forth-to feel itself alive through all its capacities by living acts of creation. Hence his early efforts are, many of them, rather exercises than works-gymnastic exercises for the fancy, the intellect, the imagination, the power of language, and even for the feelings-valuable, as the games and tasks of schoolboys are valuable, not for the thing done, but for the practice, strength, and dexterity acquired in doing it. Here we have a succession of vague melodies, in which the power of musical expression tries how far it can go; there a group of abstract ideas, turned, for the satisfaction of the creative genius, into shape ready for the sculptor-here a conceit, in which the fancy admires its own ingenuity; there a thought, of no great worth or novelty perhaps, but expressed with curious felicity :-presently we find ourselves surrounded by a bevy of first loves-Adelines, Madelines, and Lilians, more than we can remember-phantoms of female grace in every style, but all belonging to the land of shadows; then again come delineations of every state of mind, from that of the mystic who has nearly reached the highest circle, to the 'second-rate sensitive mind not in unity with itself'; and of every variety of untried being, on earth or in water, or on the earth under the water, from the grasshopper with his 'short youth, sunny and free,' to the Kraken sleeping for ages in the central depths, among millennial sponges and giant-finned polypi: whilst at intervals we recognise a genuine touch of common humanity-a Character, a Circumstance, or a sketch truly drawn from homeliest nature, which needs, however, no fancy dress to make it beautiful, but will remain for ever fresh when all that 'airy stream of lively portraiture' has faded before the increasing daylight. The superiority of his second collection of poems lay not so much in the superior workmanship (it contained perhaps fewer that were equally perfect in their kind), as in the general aim and character. If some of the blossom was gone, it was amply repaid by the more certain promise of fruit. Not only was the aim generally larger, the subjects and interest more substantial, and the endeavour more sustained, but the original and distinctive character of the man appeared more plainly. His genius was manifestly shaping a peculiar |