There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Take another instance of scrupulous care in polishing what was written. In the Morte d'Arthur, 1842, appeared the two lines Then went Sir Bedivere the second time, In the eighth edition, 1853, the line had been added, and placed between Across the ridge and paced beside the mere, simply a luxury supplied out of the poet's affluence. But Tennyson could be no less painstaking in his excisions. It may have been something of a sacrifice to him to withdraw those five powerful lines from the Ode on Wellington which run Perchance our greatness will increase; And sprinkled on the sheaves of peace. Boswell, quoting Johnson, said that "amendments are seldom made without some token of a rent," but so skilful and judicious a workman as Tennyson was not likely thus to impair the fabric which he wrought. His revisions may best be likened to the addition of ornaments or to the placing of original beauties in a clearer light. He had a keen eye for the radiance, and a sensitive ear for the melody, of words. . This is why the poems are magically bright and mystically musical. Well might Emerson declare that no one had a finer ear, nor more command of "the keys of language" than Alfred Tennyson. CHAPTER XVII. WAS TENNYSON AN ORIGINAL POET? "He thought that nothing new was said, or else -The Epic. READERS of the Poems by Two Brothers, published by Alfred and Charles Tennyson in 1827, cannot have failed to observe that the youthful poets were particularly susceptible to the influences of those ancient and modern writers whom they admired. They had brooded over the works of Horace, of Virgil, of Lucretius, of Cicero, and of Juvenal; of Byron, of Cowper, of Beattie, of Milton, and of Gray. Out of the hundred and three poems, no fewer than sixteen are prefaced with mottoes from Homer, while scholiast-wise, the two brothers had supplied in an abundance of footnotes the classical authority for their statements, and explanations of their allusions. Thus the faculty of imitation was speedily developed, and the boypoets who had admitted in their preface that “it were no easy task to light upon any novel combination of images, or to open any vein of sparkling thought untouched before," were content to adopt styles and methods from which they had derived pleasure, and which they deemed worthy of perpetuation. They plucked a few pinions from the wings of others wherewith they themselves might soar, and they succeeded in making a very respectable though in nowise a noteworthy first flight. By examining the Poems by Two Brothers, we learn with some exactness the course of reading the writers had pursued, and we discover under whose spell they had fallen. And this little volume supplies a clue to the whole of the Laureate's literary work. Like Montaigne he could say, “I number not my borrowings, but I weigh them." It is evidence of his disposition to trust to others, to seek suggestion, to gather the threads of olden thought and weave them into new and brighter patterns of truth. Lord Tennyson worked from well-recognised models. He invented but little; his was not the gift of creating but of reproducing. No one can surpass him in literary workmanship, and the stamp of his individuality is impressed upon all that he did. He uttered old thoughts, but the utterance is new. It rings out clearly, and surprises the ear with its delightful cadence. Often when he re-introduced an ancient truth he adorned it with the jewellery of magic words, and vestured it in sumptuous apparel. But the fact remains that he never told a new story or constructed an original plot; his wisdom was centuries old, and his imagery would be deemed trite but for its splendour and its charm. Shadows haunting fairily The brain, new stuffed in youth, with triumphs gay Of old romance, as Keats sang, have always been the Laureate's stock-intrade. "I assume," wrote Bayard Taylor, "that Tennyson's studies in literature have been very thorough and general, for I have been surprised by suggestions of his lines in the most unexpected places. Every author is familiar with the insidious way in which old phrases or images, which have preserved themselves in the mind, but forgotten their origin, will quietly slip into places where the like of them is needed." I do not think Tennyson ever wished to be considered an original thinker. May he not have been expressing a secret conviction when he wrote The Epic ? He thought that nothing new was said, or else X The most casual reader will speedily recognise that Tennyson, as Socrates said of himself, was "but the midwife of men's thoughts." The longest prose letter he is ever known to have written was penned to defend himself from a charge of plagiarism.1 But Tennyson is not a plagiarist, and those who understand him best will be the last to consider him such. From first to last he confined himself to the task of casting truth into new moulds, of enduing it with new significance, of bringing it into a purer light. He coins delicious phrases, which pass into current speech; he vivifies ancient wisdom, rescues thoughts in danger of perishing in a dead tongue, and restores in richer beauty the crumbling fabrics of past philosophy. This is no unworthy mission. The truth which in its primitive state existed in a rough but serviceable shell be presented in a golden casket, and the whole world, attracted, hastened to accept it. We welcome the gift that Tennyson offered, not because it was new, but because it enchanted the sense either with delicate gleams of light or the ripple of delicious melody. The novelty in literature is, as Pope defined it, "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." Judged by this standard we might even rank Tennyson, had he desired it, among the archetypal chiefs. But whoso has the advantage of a complete set of the Laureate's works will be able, picking up each volume in turn, to say "This shows the influence of Spenser, this of Keats, this of Shelley, this of Byron, this of the classical Greek and Roman writers." It will be remembered that Lytton in his furious and afterward-regretted onslaught on his young rival for the laurel crown, caustically wrote Not mine, not mine (O Muse forbid !) the boon 1 See Appendix B. The "purloin'd conceits" were not an imagined fault upon which to indict the poet. At that time Tennyson had published two volumes. One of the best-known and most admired of the poems was Mariana with its mournful refrain. The motif of that poem (putting aside the single line in Measure for Measure) may surely be found in Robert Henryson's From the Testament of Cresseid, beginning Thus chiding with her dreary destiny, Weeping, she woke the night from end to end, Might not remeid, nor yet her mourning mend. Tennyson was fond of the lyrics of old English writers in those days. In Skelton's Isabell and To Mistress Margaret Hussey he appears to have found at least a hint for his poem-pictures of female beauty. "His early poems showed a considerable amount of intellectual struggle," wrote Bayard Taylor. "We find in them traces of the influence of Milton, Shelley, and Barry Cornwall, but very rarely of Keats, of whom Tennyson has been called singularly enough, the lineal poetical child.1 Indeed he and Keats have little in common except the sense of luxury in words, which was born with both, and could not be outgrown. But the echoes of Shelley, in the poems afterwards omitted from the volume which Tennyson published in 1830, are not to be mistaken. Take this stanza as an example: The varied earth, the moving heaven, By secret fire and midnight storms Of living things, the wondrous tones 1 In 1889 a correspondent, in reply to an inquiry, received an autograph note from Tennyson-" Keats and Horace were great masters, but not my masters." |