APPENDIX A.

LOCALISING THE LAUREATE'S POEMS.

IT is far from my wish to raise controversy in this volume, but inasmuch as the Laureate's letter, as well as my own motives, have been greatly misunderstood, and as whatever Tennyson wrote must be regarded as having some historical value, I venture to reproduce his communication to me on the question of "localising." Lord Tennyson (through the medium of his son) informed me that "however pleasant my volume ["In Tennyson Land"] might be, he thought I had ridden my hobby to death. The Ode to Memory and In Memoriam alone of his poems contain any reference to Somersby. All the poems quoted . . . have nothing of Lincolnshire about them and are purely imaginative inventions." To which I venture to reply: No poet can be accepted as a judge of his own characteristics. The cumulative evidence against the Laureate's assertion is convincing, and it is remarkable that if the Lincolnshire element in the poems is an "imaginative invention," the poet waited until he was eighty years old before declaring it. Forty years previously Charles Kingsley had stated that the poems showed the colour and tone of Lincolnshire, and Tennyson did not correct him. The Rev. Drummond Rawnsley, Tennyson's particular friend, and himself a native of the same county, wrote seventeen years before-“As a Lincolnshire man, and long familiar with the district in which Mr Tennyson was born, I have often been struck with the many illustrations of our county's scenery and character to be found in his poems. What Wordsworth has done for the English Lakes and Scott for the Highlands, our poet has done for the homelier scenes of his boyhood and early manhood in Mid-Lincolnshire. They live for us in his pages, depicted with all the truth and accuracy of a photograph." Dr Peter Bayne, in Lessons from the Masters says-" The poems of the first volume bear curiously vivid marks of the Lincolnshire birth-land of the poet. . . . We seem as we read these early verses of Tennyson's to be actually transported to the scenes. . . . He trusts nothing to random strokes. . . . He sees the landscape, and details its features. He localises the moated grange for us by minute specific touches." The Rev. J. W. Dawson asserts that "Wordsworth never drew a

picture of mountain solitude or lake scenery more simply true than the Lincolnshire poet gives of the great open spaces of the Fen country. His scenery is specially characteristic of Lincolnshire." So said Edmund Clarence Stedman, and many others: in short, there seems to have been a conspiracy upon the part of those who knew Lincolnshire to "localise" the Laureate's poems. I fail to see that the practice is pernicious. Tennyson's letter was honest : he was unconscious to what a great extent Lincolnshire entered into his poetry. But what can be said of the few so-called students of his works who accepted his denial and also declared that they could find no such evidence in support of my contention? Happily their number was extremely small ; and I have to thank the many who readily and spontaneously came to my aid and justified me in my work. We must have heroes and be allowed to worship them, and there are few modes more disinterested and less obnoxious than that of making their homes classic shrines. If authors and poets consciously or unconsciously describe the scenery of a locality, or if the spirit of a place is infused into their work and recognisable, what harm can come of identification? Scenes are the more inspiring for their associations, and there can be no more elevating pursuit than tracing their influence upon gifted minds. Nor can it be urged that we detract from a poet's merits by believing in his fidelity to nature and his ability to pourtray its beauty. We do not ask or expect the poet to be hard and restrained, and we do not deny him imagination; we only search for truth in fairest and purest guise, and discovery wrongs no one. Great artists in words and colours have bequeathed to us real pictures of visible things - Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Thomson, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, and the legacy to be treasured must be fully understood.

APPENDIX B.

TENNYSON'S LETTER ON PLAGIARISM AND SUGGESTION.

THE following important letter on Plagiarism is referred to in the chapter on Tennyson's originality. It was addressed to Mr S. E. Dawson, author of A Study of" The Princess," published at Montreal. ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, SURREY, Nov. 21, 1882

DEAR SIR,-I thank you for your able and thoughtful essay on The Princess. You have seen, among other things, that if women ever were to play such freaks the tragic and the burlesque might go hand in hand. I may tell you that the songs were not an afterthought.

Before the first edition came out, I deliberated with myself whether I should put songs in between the separate divisions of the poem ; again, I thought, the poem will explain itself; but the public did not see that the child, as you say, was the heroine of the piece, and at last I conquered my laziness and inserted them. You would be still more certain that the child was the true heroine, if, instead of the first song as it now stands,

As thro' the land at eve we went,

I had printed the first song which I wrote, The Losing of the Child. The child is sitting on the bank of the river and playing with flowers -a flood comes down-a dam has been broken through-the child is borne down by the flood-the whole village distracted-after a time the flood has subsided-the child is thrown safe and sound again upon the bank, and all the women are in raptures. I quite forget the words of the ballad, but I think I may have it somewhere.

Your explanatory notes are very much to the purpose, and I do not object to your finding parallelisms. They must always recur. A man (a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me saying that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem there were two whole lines of mine almost word for word. Why not? Are not human eyes all over the world looking at the same objects, and must there not consequently be coincidences of thought and impressions and expressions? It is scarcely possible for anyone to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which in the rest of the literature of the world a parallel could not somewhere be found. But when you say that this passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or Shelley or another, I demur, and, more, I wholly disagree. There was a period in my life when, as an artist-Turner, for instance—takes rough sketches of language, &c., in order to work them eventually into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain, e.g.:—

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight.

Suggestion: The sea one night at Torquay, when Torquay was the most lovely sea village in England, though now a smoky town; the sky was covered with thin vapour, and the moon was behind it.

A great black cloud

Drags inward from the deep.

Suggestion: A coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon.

In the Idylls of the King :—

With all

Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies. Suggestion: A storm which came upon us in the middle of the North Sea.

As the water-lily starts and slides.

Suggestion: Water-lilies in my own pond, seen in a gusty day with my own eyes. They did start and slide in the sudden puffs of wind till caught and staved by the tether of their own stalks-quite as true as Wordsworth's simile, and more in detail.

A wild wind shook

Follow, follow, thou shalt win.

Suggestion: I was walking in the New Forest. A wind did arise

and

Shake the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks

Of the wild wood together.

The wind, I believe, was a west wind, but because I wished the Prince to go south, I turned the wind to the south, and naturally the wind said "Follow." I believe the resemblance which you note is just a chance one. Shelley's lines are not familiar to me, though, of course, if they occur in the Prometheus I must have read them.

I could multiply instances, but I will not bore you; and far indeed am I from asserting that books, as well as nature, are not, and ought not to be, suggestive to the poet. I am sure that I myself and many others find a peculiar charm in those passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton where they adopt the creation of a bygone poet, and reclothe it, more or less, according to their own fancy.

But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up among us, editors of booklets, bookworms, index hunters, or men of great memories and no imagination—who impute themselves to the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for ever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate.

They will not allow one to say "Ring the bells," without finding that we have taken it from Sir P. Sydney, or even to use such a simple expression as the ocean roars " without finding out the precise verse in Homer or Horace from which we have plagiarised it. (Fact!)

I have known an old fishwife who had lost two sons at sea clench her fist at the advancing tide on a stormy day and cry out, "Ay, roar ; do! How I hates to see thee show thy white teeth!" Now, if I had adopted her exclamation, and put it into the mouth of some old woman

in one of my poems, I daresay the critic would have thought it original enough, but would most likely have advised me to go to nature for my old woman, and not to my imagination; and, indeed, it is a strong figure. Here is another little anecdote about suggestion. When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these mountains before a waterfall that comes down 1000 feet or 1200 feet, I sketched it (according to my custom then) in these words :

Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn.

When I printed this a critic informed me that "lawn" was the material used in theatres to imitate a waterfall, and graciously added, "Mr T. should not go to the boards of a theatre, but to nature herself, for his suggestions."

And I had gone to nature herself. I think it is a moot point whether, if I had known how that effect was produced on the stage, I should have ventured to publish the line.-I beg you to believe me, &c., A. TENNYSON.

P.S.-By the by, you are wrong about "the tremulous isles of light"; they are isles of light, spots of sunshine coming through the eaves, and seeming to slide from one to the other, as the procession of girls move under the shade." And surely the "beard-blown goat" involves a sense of the wind blowing the beard on the height of the ruined pillar