Compare, again, the old stanza in The Miller’s Daughter:—

How dear to me in youth, my love, Was everything about the mill; The black and silent pool above, The pool beneath it never still,

with what was afterwards substituted:—

I loved the brimming wave that swam Through quiet meadows round the mill, The sleepy pool above the dam, The pool beneath it never still.

Another most felicitous emendation is to be found in The Poet, where the edition of 1830 reads:—

And in the bordure of her robe was writ Wisdom, a name to shake Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit.

This in 1842 appears as:—

And in her raiment’s hem was trac’d in flame Wisdom, a name to shake All evil dreams of power—a sacred name.

Again, in the Lotos Eaters

Three thunder-cloven thrones of oldest snow Stood sunset-flushed

is changed into

Three silent pinnacles of aged snow.

So in Will Waterproof the cumbrous

Like Hezekiah’s backward runs The shadow of my days,

was afterwards simplified into

Against its fountain upward runs The current of my days.

Not less felicitous have been the additions made from time to time. Thus in Audley Court the concluding lines ran:—

The harbour buoy, With one green sparkle ever and anon Dipt by itself.

But what vividness is there in the subsequent insertion of

“Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm.”

between the first line and the second.

So again in the Morte d’Arthur how greatly are imagery and rhythm improved by the insertion of

Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,

between

Then went Sir Bedivere the second time,

and

Counting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought.

There is an alteration in Œnone which is very interesting. Till 1884 this was allowed to stand:—

The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps.

No one could have known better than Tennyson that the cicala is loudest in the torrid calm of the noonday, as Theocritus, Virgil, Byron and innumerable other poets have noticed; at last he altered it, but at the heavy price of a cumbrous pleonasm, into “and the winds are dead”.

He allowed many years to elapse before he corrected another error in natural history—but at last the alteration came. In The Poet’s Song in the line—

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,

the “fly” which the swallow does hunt was substituted for what it does not hunt, and that for very obvious reasons.

But whoever would see what Tennyson’s poetry has owed to elaborate revision and scrupulous care would do well to compare the first edition of Mariana in the South, The Sea-Fairies, Œnone, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art and A Dream of Fair Women with the poems as they are presented in 1853. Poets do not always improve their verses by revision, as all students of Wordsworth’s text could abundantly illustrate; but it may be doubted whether, in these poems at least, Tennyson ever made a single alteration which was not for the better. Fitzgerald, indeed, contended that in some cases, particularly in The Miller’s Daughter, Tennyson would have done well to let the first reading stand, but few critics would agree with him in the instances he gives. We may perhaps regret the sacrifice of such a stanza as this—

Each coltsfoot down the grassy bent, Whose round leaves hold the gathered shower, Each quaintly folded cuckoo pint, And silver-paly cuckoo flower.

II

Tennyson’s genius was slow in maturing. The poems contributed by him to the volume of 1827, Poems by Two Brothers, are not without some slight promise, but are very far from indicating extraordinary powers. A great advance is discernible in Timbuctoo, but that Matthew Arnold should have discovered in it the germ of Tennyson’s future powers is probably to be attributed to the youth of the critic. Tennyson was in his twenty-second year when the Poems Chiefly Lyrical appeared, and what strikes us in these poems is certainly not what Arthur Hallam saw in them: much rather what Coleridge and Wilson discerned in them. They are the poems of a fragile and somewhat morbid young man in whose temper we seem to see a touch of Hamlet, a touch of Romeo and, more healthily, a touch of Mercutio. Their most promising characteristic is the versatility displayed. Thus we find Mariana side by side with the Supposed Confessions, the Ode to Memory with οἱ ῥέοντες, The Ballad of Oriana with The Dying Swan, Recollections of The Arabian Nights with The Poet. Their worst fault is affectation. Perhaps the utmost that can be said for them is that they display a fine but somewhat thin vein of original genius, after deducing what they owe to Coleridge, to Keats and to other poets. This is seen in the magical touches of description, in the exquisite felicity of expression and rhythm which frequently mark them, in the pathos and power of such a poem as Oriana, in the pathos and charm of such poems as Mariana and A Dirge, in the rich and almost gorgeous fancy displayed in The Recollections.

The poems of 1833 are much more ambitious and strike deeper notes. Here comes in for the first time that σπουδαιότης, that high seriousness which is one of Tennyson’s chief characteristics—we see it in The Palace of Art, in Œnone and in the verses To J. S. But in intrinsic merit the poems were no advance on their predecessors, for the execution was not equal to the design. The best, such as Œnone, A Dream of Fair Women, The Palace of Art, The Lady of Shalott—I am speaking of course of these poems in their first form—were full of extraordinary blemishes. The volume was degraded by pieces which were very unworthy of him, such as O Darling Room and the verses To Christopher North, and affectations of the worst kind deformed many, nay, perhaps the majority of 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.