been made midway between these two lines, for the stanza To search thro' all I felt and saw The springs of life, the depths of awe, And reach the law within the law, was a substitution for, and transformation of, To search the law within the law, The springs of life, the depths of awe. There had also been a change in the order of the verses, for the stanza had originally preceded the one it now follows. Only Tennyson himself could have realised the necessity of this. In regard to minor changes, the alteration of single words and single lines, the excellent work done by the author of Tennysoniana can scarcely be bettered. It is almost a tedious task to trace the multitudinous revisions, yet to the student such labour has its compensations and advantages. Whoso cares to read the original Lady of Shalott side by side with the present version will have some conception of the extraordinary pains Tennyson must have taken in choosing and rejecting mere words, in pruning lines, and in introducing new stanzas. No fewer than seventy lines are new or changed. The last verse is an addition, and takes the place of one much inferior.— They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest; There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits at Camelot. "The web was woven curiously, The charm is broken utterly; Draw near and fear not, this is I, The Lady of Shalott." On several occasions the poet changed his mind again and again, and re-inserted poems which he had previously rejected, or re-admitted lines in their original form and abandoned a later revision. He excluded, for instance, the second verse of the lyric, "As thro' the land at eve we went," And blessings on the falling out, That all the more endears, When we fall out with those we love, And kiss again with tears! and after some years suddenly and unexpectedly included it again. The re-admission secured popular approval. On the other hand, we should be sorry to find the introduction to A Dream of Fair Women or The Miller's Daughter inserted afresh, and we can dispense with those portions of the Palace of Art which only served to enrage the Quarterly reviewer. Although In Memoriam was the work of so many years it was only long after its publication that it was brought to its present condition of verbal excellence. There are something like forty minor corrections and improvements, some of them only consisting of a change of tense, or an altered preposition or conjunction, but nevertheless deemed essential by the nice sense of the poet. There were also additions to be made, sections xxxix. and lix. (as now numbered) not appearing in the original edition. No poem was too small for the poet's attention, and no poem was too great to escape his further consideration. He inserted new lines, erased old ones, chose better words, amended phrases, and thus did all that skill and art could accomplish to make the work of his life flawless and enduring. How marvellous was the change wrought may be best understood by comparing the opening lines of Enone, published in the 1833 volume, with those which appeared in the volume of 1842. Originally the first passage wasThere is a dale in Ida, lovelier Than any in Ionia, beautiful With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean A path thro' steep-down granite walls below, And this has since been expanded into 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, Counting the dewy pebbles, fix'd in thought. 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 poct'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 |