Alfred Tennyson. Andrew Lang
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not (as the families of genius ought to be) brief of life and unhealthy. “The Tennysons never die,” said the sister who was betrothed to Arthur Hallam. The father, a clergyman, was, says his grandson, “a man of great ability,” and his “excellent library” was an element in the education of his family. “My father was a poet,” Tennyson said, “and could write regular verse very skilfully.” In physical type the sons were tall, strong, and unusually dark: Tennyson, when abroad, was not taken for an Englishman; at home, strangers thought him “foreign.” Most of the children had the temperament, and several of the sons had some of the accomplishments, of genius: whence derived by way of heredity is a question beyond conjecture, for the father’s accomplishment was not unusual. As Walton says of the poet and the angler, they “were born to be so”: we know no more.
The region in which the paternal hamlet of Somersby lies, “a land of quiet villages, large fields, grey hillsides, and noble tall-towered churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold,” does not appear to have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. The folk-lore of Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to have a peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous than the poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears to have known. In brief, we have nothing to inform us as to how genius came into that generation of Tennysons which was born between 1807 and 1819. A source and a cause there must have been, but these things are hidden, except from popular science.
Precocity is not a sign of genius, but genius is perhaps always accompanied by precocity. This is especially notable in the cases of painting, music, and mathematics; but in the matter of literature genius may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who when a boy knew much, but did little that would attract notice. As a child and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. In another passage he says, “The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was this—
‘With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood’—
great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!”
It was fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this nonsense verse. “Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, ‘I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind,’ and the words ‘far, far away’ had always a strange charm for me.” A late lyric has this overword, Far, far away!
A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less precocious. Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in Pope’s measure. At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott’s manner, of some six thousand lines. He “never felt himself more truly inspired,” for the sense of “inspiration” (as the late Mr. Myers has argued in an essay on the “Mechanism of Genius”) has little to do with the actual value of the product. At fourteen Tennyson wrote a drama in blank verse. A chorus from this play (as one guesses), a piece from “an unpublished drama written very early,” is published in the volume of 1830:—
“The varied earth, the moving heaven,
The rapid waste of roving sea,
The fountain-pregnant mountains riven
To shapes of wildest anarchy,
By secret fire and midnight storms
That wander round their windy cones.”
These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical transcript, “the varied earth,” dædala tellus. There is the geological interest in the forces that shape the hills. There is the use of the favourite word “windy,” and later in the piece—
“The troublous autumn’s sallow gloom.”
The young poet from boyhood was original in his manner.
Byron made him blasé at fourteen. Then Byron died, and Tennyson scratched on a rock “Byron is dead,” on “a day when the whole world seemed darkened for me.” Later he considered Byron’s poetry “too much akin to rhetoric.” “Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is endlessly clever, and is now unduly depreciated.” He “did give the world another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going.” But “he was dominated by Byron till he was seventeen, when he put him away altogether.”
In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he endured for a while at school at Louth; despite bullying from big boys and masters, Tennyson would “shout his verses to the skies.” “Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous,” he used to say to one of his brothers. He observed nature very closely by the brook and the thundering sea-shores: he was never a sportsman, and his angling was in the manner of the lover of The Miller’s Daughter. He was seventeen (1826) when Poems by Two Brothers (himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the date 1827. These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover, nothing really Tennysonian. What he had done in his own manner was omitted, “being thought too much out of the common for the public taste.” The young poet had already saving common-sense, and understood the public. Fragments of the true gold are found in the volume of 1830, others are preserved in the Biography. The ballad suggested by The Bride of Lammermoor was not unworthy of Beddoes, and that novel, one cannot but think, suggested the opening situation in Maud, where the hero is a modern Master of Ravenswood in his relation to the rich interloping family and the beautiful daughter. To this point we shall return. It does not appear that Tennyson was conscious in Maud of the suggestion from Scott, and the coincidence may be merely accidental.
The Lover’s Tale, published in 1879, was mainly a work of the poet’s nineteenth year. A few copies had been printed for friends. One of these, with errors of the press, and without the intended alterations, was pirated by an unhappy man in 1875. In old age Tennyson brought out the work of his boyhood. “It was written before I had ever seen Shelley, though it is called Shelleyan,” he said; and indeed he believed that his work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the manner of Thomson and of Scott. The only things in The Lover’s Tale which would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene of the story, the character of the versification, and the extraordinary luxuriance and exuberance of the imagery. [7] As early as 1868 Tennyson heard that written copies of The Lover’s Tale were in circulation. He then remarked, as to the exuberance of the piece: “Allowance must be made for abundance of youth. It is rich and full, but there are mistakes in it. … The poem is the breath of young love.”
How truly Tennysonian the manner is may be understood even from the opening lines, full of the original cadences which were to become so familiar:—
“Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff,
Filling with purple gloom the vacancies
Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas
Hung in mid-heaven, and half way down rare sails,
White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky.”
The narrative in parts one and two (which alone were written in youth) is so choked with images and descriptions as to be almost obscure. It is the story, practically, of a love like that of Paul and Virginia, but the love is not returned by the girl, who prefers the friend of the narrator. Like the hero of Maud, the speaker has a period of madness and illusion; while the third part, “The Golden Supper”—suggested by a story of Boccaccio, and written in maturity—is put in the mouth of another narrator, and is in a different style. The discarded lover, visiting the vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her alive, and restores her to her husband. The whole finished legend is necessarily not among the author’s masterpieces. But perhaps not even Keats in his earliest work displayed