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Tennyson's Development During the “Ten Years' Silence” (1832–1842)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

Tennyson once remarked that he had been nearer thirty than twenty before he was anything of an artist, and his 1842 poems, which were his first mature publication, pre-eminently reflect an assiduous artistic novitiate. They have also been alleged to show how early he began that feeble self-adjustment to public taste which supposedly undermined his genius. Since they did appeal more directly than their predecessors of 1830 and 1832 to the prepossessions of the middle-class reader, and since they were produced during the years when he was supposedly kept silent by critical hostility, the disinterestedness of the 1842 volumes can plausibly be suspected. Yet important though it is to know how far this charge is justified, no adequate enquiry has as yet been made into the influence exerted on them by the reviews, for the statistics which must be thoroughly sifted before any reliable verdict can be reached have been over-simplified in the only two detailed enquiries which have as yet been published.3

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 5 , September 1951 , pp. 662 - 697
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 662 Alfred Lard Tennyson: A Memoir by Bis Son (London, 1899), p. 10.

Note 2 in page 662 Hugh l'Anson Fausset singles out six major poems to illustrate the intrusion of “topical and commercial purpose” and finds that at this period Tennyson began to conciliate the world “at the price of treason to his genius” (Tennyson, A Modern Portrait [London, 1923], pp. 98–99, 108). Harold Nîcolson states that by 1842 literary taste had been emasculated by the Annuals and that Tennyson never drank enough port during the Ten Years' Silence to forget that he was writing for an audience of young ladies (Tennyson: Aspects of Bis Life, Character and Poetry [London, 1923], pp. 104–105, 152).

Note 3 in page 662 T. R. Lounsbury concluded after a cursory survey that the 1842 volumes vindicated Tennyson's independence (The Life and Times of Tennyson [London, 1915], pp. 402–415). The superficiality of his analysis has been rightly pointed out by Edgar Finley Shannon, who has sought on the other hand to show that Tennyson was “profoundly influenced” by the reviewers, that he rewrote or discarded more than half the poems and passages they censured, and that he gave to their advice in general “an attentive consideration in order for a young poet with his reputation to make” (“Tennyson and the Reviewers,” PMLA, LVIII [1943], 181–194). My own investigation reaches different conclusions, chiefly because I cannot agree with Shannon that the possibility that Tennyson's opinions sometimes coincided with the reviewers' “weakens his position very little” (p. 189).

Note 4 in page 662 Tennyson published 2 vols, of poems in 1842. The second consisted of new work; the first contained two sections, devoted respectively to the poems of 1830 and 1832. Five additional poems appeared in the 1832 section, and Tennyson appended a note stating that these “with one exception were written in 1833” (Poems by Alfred Tennyson [London 1842], p. 234).

Note 5 in page 663 The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. John Churton Collins (London 1900), p. 306. This volume contains all the suppressed poems and early versions mentioned in this article and I have included page references only when quoting. Much of this discarded work is to be found in the appendices to standard editions.

Note 6 in page 663 “Tennyson . . . regrets that he has published at all yet”—letter from Edward Fitzgerald to W. B. Donne, 25 Oct. 1833—Life and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, ed. William Aldis Wright (London 1889), i, 20.

Note 7 in page 664 See Appendix, pp. 685–697.

Note 8 in page 664 Chapts. v-Vp (pp. 97–151).

Note 9 in page 664 Alfred Tennyson (London 1949), Part i, Chapts. v-vi, xii, xiii, xiv; Part ii, Chapts. I-VII.

Note 10 in page 664 Ibid., pp. 46–47, 61, 105, 127, 128, 146, 150, 179, 199.

Note 11 in page 664 Memoir, p. 104.

Note 12 in page 664 Blackwood's Magasine, xxxi (1832), 725.

Note 13 in page 664 Among the 1830 poems Isabel (which portrayed his mother), two sonnets to his Cambridge friends: To J. M. K. (John Kemble) and To—(Joseph Blakesley), A Character, The Deserted House, English War Song, and National Song had all expressed this impulse. The opening sonnet of the 1832 volume had renounced exclusiveness, as had The Palace of Art, while To J.S. (James Spedding), ? Darling Room, The Miller's Daughter, The May Queen, New Year's Eve, The Death of the Old Year, Buonaparte, Sonnet on Hearing of the Polish Insurrection, and Sonnet on the Late Russian Invasion of Poland continued the direct appeal to universal interests.

Note 14 in page 665 Memoir, pp. 83, 105; Alfred Tennyson, pp. 149,163.

Note 16 in page 665 Hallam and Tennyson were from their first acquaintance concerned to define and vindicate the credentials of imaginative perception. T. H. Vail Motter has already suggested that they may first have met in April 1829, in connection with their entries for the Chancellor's prize for English verse, which had to be in by the end of this month, and he has convincingly demonstrated that the meeting took place not earlier than 28 Feb. 1829, and not later than May of this year. “When did Tennyson first meet Hallam?” MLN, lvii (March 1942), 207–208.

However, a letter written by Hallam's friend, James Milnes Gaskell, in June 1829, seems to show conclusively that they did meet in connection with these entries and that they considered together the treatment to be given to the set subject of “Timbuctoo.” Gaskell writes that he has heard from Hallam that although Tennyson's poem won the prize, its pervading idea was taken from him (Hallam) and that he felt himself “entitled to the honours of a Sancho Panza in the notable war waged in the year 1829 against prosaicism and jingle-jangle” (An Eton Boy, being the letters of James Milnes Gaskell from Eton and Oxford 1820–1830, ed. C. M. Gaskell [London 1939], pp. 164–165). This “pervading idea” was the contrast between the legendary fame of “Timbuctoo” and the precise knowledge which would result from its discovery.

Note 16 in page 666 The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: MLA, 1943), p. 184. The review was originally published in Moxon's Englishman's Magazine (Aug. 1831), pp. 616–628.

Note 17 in page 666 Hallam's writings reveal a mind exceptionally endowed both with intuitive idealism and with ratiocinative power, and those of his letters which appear in the Memoir show that he supported Tennyson not only with unceasing practical help and encouragement, but by his ability to chart and consolidate those explorations to which his friend was led by a more intense but haphazard vision. Between 1827 and 1831 he had himself written a considerable body of verse, some of which he had originally intended to publish jointly with Tennyson's 1830 poems, though he decided that his work was too crude (Memoir, p. 43). After 1831 he turned almost entirely to prose essays, the most important of which, the “Theodicsea Novissima,” seeks to vindicate Christian revelation. His decision to renounce poetic composition for a closer contemplation of Christian truth is expressed in a sonnet first published by Vail Motter (Writings, p. 112).

Note 18 in page 666 Memoir, p. 71.

Note 19 in page 666 Lionel Stevenson has pointed out that the Lady of Shalott has a personal application parallel to that of the Palace of Art (“The High-born Maiden Symbolism in Tennyson,” ?MLA, LXII [March 1948], 234–243). He is, however, concerned with Tennyson's changing use of this particular symbol, and does not discuss the general symbolism of the 1832 volume. Sir Charles Tennyson's biography notices in passing the symbolic intention of the Lady of Shalott, the Lotos-Eaters and the Hesperides, and their contrast with the Palace of Art, but does not develop the point (Alfred Tennyson, Part I, pp. 132–133).

Note 20 in page 667 Early Poems, p. 49, n. 5.

Note 21 in page 667 The Works of Tennyson, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson (London 1907), Poems I, pp. 61–62.

Note 22 in page 667 Early Poems, p. 80.

Note 23 in page 668 In the original version of the Dream of Fair Women Tennyson mentions the need to find some remedy for the continued sacrifice of beauty and innocence to the selfishness of the “grosser nature” (ibid., p. 116, n. 2), and Mariana in the South originally differed from the Mariana of 1830 in implying that the girl's isolation is not complete: the universe is in conscious sympathy with her if she could perceive it (ibid., p. 53, n. 1). Finally, the May Queen and New Year's Eve do represent an advance from fanciful brooding to the demands of a human situation. The same is true of the Miller's Daughter, where Tennyson's nostalgic passion was more successfully projected into a narrative of rustic life.

Note 24 in page 668 Ibid., pp. 314–315.

Note 25 in page 668 Tennyson gave this name to the nostalgic preoccupation of his youth in The Ancient Sage, first published in Ballads and other Poems in 1880.

Note 26 in page 669 Early Poems, p. 302.

Note 27 in page 669 This Commonplace Book was in the hands of the Heath family until 1932, when it was bought at Sotheby's by the friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Sotheby's Catalogue of Sales, 25 and 26 July 1932, Item No. 291a). John Heath was, like Tennyson and Hallam, a member of the small private debating society nicknamed the “Apostles,” founded at St. John's College in 1820 and centred from 1826 at Trinity College. Heath graduated in 1830, became a Fellow of Trinity in 1831, and continued in residence till 1844, becoming successively Assistant Tutor and Tutor. The correspondence of the Apostles shows that Tennyson remained in close contact and communication with him and his two brothers between 1830 and 1836.

Note 30 in page 670 Of this 8-line fragment the first 2 lines: From sorrow sorrow yet is born Hopes flow like water thro' a sieve

remain unpublished. The remaining 6 were published by Sir Charles Tennyson in 1936 (Cornhill Magazine, CLIII, 448). Hallam Tennyson also published 2 of the lines (Memoir, p. 104), giving the erroneous impression that they were written after Hallam's death.

Note 31 in page 670 Published by Hallam Tennyson with the date 1828 (Memoir, p. 46). The Memoir and the Heath MS. also differ in their dating of the Sonnet to Poesy (Memoir, p. 51), which Hallam Tennyson attributes to 1830, and Heath to 1828. The notebook of another Cambridge friend, John Allen, now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, also attributes this sonnet to 1828, and it seems likely that contemporary enthusiasm was more accurate than the more casual methods of the Memoir.

Note 32 in page 670 “I trust you finished the Gardener's Daughter” (letter from Arthur Hallam, 31 July 1833, Memoir, p. 87).

Note 33 in page 671 Memoir, p. 109.

Note 34 in page 671 Ibid., p. 161, n. 1; p. 90, n. 2.

Note 35 in page 671 Ibid., p. 92.

Note 36 in page 671 Ibid., p. 163.

Note 37 in page 671 The first draft of this lyric, dated 1833 (Heath MS., pp. 110–112), consists of 6 stanzas, which already express acute longing for contact with the spirit of a dead woman, and complain of being haunted by her unreal phantom. The second draft, consisting of 10 stanzas (Heath MS., pp. 172–176), gives further details of the confusion of the mourner wandering through city streets, and recalls the lovers' earlier meetings. The version which Tennyson later sent to the Tribute differs in many details and adds a further 5 stanzas (The Tribute. A collection of Miscellaneous Unpublished Poems by Various Authors. Edited by Lord Northampton [London 1837]), pp. 244–250. The lyric was eventually adapted to form the fourth section of Maud (Part ii).

Note 38 in page 671 Alfred Tennyson, p. 143.

Note 39 in page 671 The Cambridge Apostles by F. M. Brookfield (London 1906), p. 172.

Note 40 in page 671 “Poems by Alfred Tennyson,” xlix (April 1833), 81–96.

Note 41 in page 672 Sir Galahad is transcribed in this MS. among poems written after Hallam's death. Tennyson said in 1834 that it was meant for “a male counterpart of St. Agnes” (Memoir, p. 119).

Note 42 in page 672 Memoir, pp. 519–521.

Note 43 in page 672 Ibid., p. 519.

Note 44 in page 672 These were The Little Maid, published by Hallam Tennyson (Memoir, p. 117), Requiescat, published in Enoch Arden, etc. (London 1864), and a few variant lines of St. Simeon Stylites.

Note 45 in page 672 One of these poems was first published as Early Spring, in the Youth's Companion (Boston, U.S.A., 1884), and secondly in Tiresias and other Poems (London, 1885). Its content certainly implies an earlier date than the spring of 1834. Of the other two, The Lord of Burleigh was included in the 1842 volume, and Lisette was published by Sir Charles Tennyson in Unpublished Early Poems by Alfred Tennyson (London 1931), pp. 52–53.

Note 46 in page 672 The whole group of poems occupies pp. 141–142, 154–183, and 220–278 of the Heath MS. A group of poems and translations by Arthur Hallam occupies pp. 184–217. Of the many variants between the published and Heath MS. versions of Tennyson's poems, some of the most interesting occur in On a Mourner, first published in Selections from the Works of Alfred Tennyson (London, 1865). The published poem implies by a change of pronoun that the grief is another person's, not Tennyson's. In the MS. version two unpublished stanzas occurring between the third and fourth of the published poem refer to Arthur Hallam, and stress the inadequacy of the comfort Nature can give:

'Come beat a little quicker now,

When all things own my quickening breath

Thy friend is mute: his brows are low

But I am with thee till thy death'

Some such kind words to me she saith.

Yet is she mortal even as I

Or as that friend I loved in vain

She only whispering, low or high

Thro' this vast cloud of grief and pain

I had not found my peace again. (Heath MS., pp. 181–182).

Note 47 in page 673 These 12 stanzas are entitled The Statesman (Memoir, pp. 93–94). A further 5 stanzas of the poem were published as Hail Briton by Sir Charles Tennyson, who took them from a MS. version in a notebook which also contained a draft of the Two. Voices. He points out that some stanzas were subsequently adapted for use in In Memoriam, Ode on the Duke of Wellington, and Lines to the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava (Unpublished Early Poems, pp. 73–74). The whole of this long poem was recently published by Mary Joan Donahue (“Tennyson's Bail Britonl and Tithon in the Heath MS.,” PMLA, LXIV [June 1949], 385–416). Miss Donahue notes and discusses connections in phrase, metaphor, and thought between this poem and various sections of In Memoriam.

Note 48 in page 673 Cf. In Memoriam, Section LXXXV, Stanza 15.

Note 49 in page 674 See above, n. 48.

Note 50 in page 674 Cf. the last two lines of Maud (The Princess and Maud, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson [London 1908], p. 230).

Note 51 in page 674 These formed Sections xxx, xvii, xviii, xix, xxxi, and part of Section LXXV.

Note 52 in page 674 Memoir, p. 268.

Note 53 in page 675 See Appendix, p. 686.

Note 54 in page 675 The page references of these reviews are given in the Appendix. I have not added them in these notes except when quoting.

Note 55 in page 675 Memoir, p. 82.

Note 56 in page 675 Lines 8–15 of 1830 (Early Poems, p. 27).

Note 57 in page 675 The Deserted House, Hero and Leander, and Love and Sorrow.

Note 58 in page 676 Memoir, pp. 81–82.

Note 59 in page 676 Ibid., p. 72. Lounsbury has already noticed the significance of Hallam's comment (Life and Times of Tennyson, p. 401), but unfortunately no date is given in the Memoir for the letter in question. However, this must surely be the lost letter to Tennyson which Hallam mentioned when writing to Emily Tennyson (19 May 1832), a letter reproduced in The Love Story of In Memoriam, With a Foreword by Clement Shorter (privately ptd., 1916). Hallam complains to Emily of the delayed arrival of a parcel he had sent to Somersby containing Blackwood's Magazine (for May 1832) and an important private communication for Alfred. The undated letter in the Memoir is clearly a covering note enclosed with North's review, so that however late the parcel arrived (Tennyson told North, Memoir, p. 81, that he did not read his critique until five months after it appeared), Hallam's letter to Tennyson must have been written before the middle of May 1832, and must refer to a state of mind already existing in him at that time.

Note 60 in page 676 John O. Eidson states that the two volumes were circulating among the Harvard Transcendentalist School from 1830 onwards. An enthusiastic review was published by a friend of Emerson's in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1836 (Eidson, Tennyson in America [Univ. of Georgia Press, 1943], p. 4). A review in the Dial, ii (July 1841), 135, probably by Margaret Fuller, states that “nothing has been known for ten years back more the darling of the young than these two little volumes.” By the late thirties the scarcity of copies provoked urgent requests for a new edition. Emerson encouraged C. C. Little and Co. of Boston to reprint the volumes, and they wrote to Tennyson with this suggestion in May 1838, and again with greater urgency in 1841, when he replied that he intended to republish in England (Alfred Tennyson, pp. 179, 188–189).

Note 61 in page 677 Christian Examiner, xxiii (Jan. 1838), 325.

Note 62 in page 677 Edward Fitzgerald states this in a note on p. 148 of his copy of Poems chiefly Lyrical (1830), now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Note 63 in page 677 have not included the Mystic, Rosalind, or Kate among this group, for although each had been praised by one critic and had otherwise escaped specific censure, each had also been the subject of an unfavourable allusion which could have been thought indirectly derogatory, despite the fact that the poem in question was not mentioned by name.

Note 64 in page 677 These were Mariana, the Ode to Memory, Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind, New Year's Eve, Lilian, The Deserted House and The May Queen.

Note 65 in page 677 The Burial of Love, the song I' the glooming light, Hero to Leander, Love and Sorrow, the song The lintwhite and the throstlecock, Love, Dualisms, and the sonnet But were I loved as I desire to be.

Note 68 in page 678 All Things will Die and Nothing will Die were commended by the Spectator (1830), the Westminster Review, the Tatler, the New Monthly Magazine (1831), and the Monthly Repository and Review. The Kraken was praised by the first, third, and fourth of these reviews, and the Sea Fairies by the second and fourth. The Kraken was also praised by Dwight in the Christian Examiner and the Sea Fairies by Hallam in the Englishman's Magazine.

Note 67 in page 678 The Merman and the Mermaid were praised by the first four reviews named above, and also by Dwight. The first Owl song was praised by Hunt in the Tatler and the first and second by the Monthly Repository and Review.

Note 68 in page 678 Spectator, iii (June 1830), 637–638.

Note 69 in page 678 These were the Elegiacs, *Love, Pride, and Forgetfulness, *Lost Hope, *The Tears of Heaven, National Song, *English Warsong, We are Free, the song *Who can say, *O Darling Room, To—(“All good things have not kept aloof”), and the sonnets *Shall the hag evil die with child of Good, Mine be the strength of spirit fierce and free, and Buonaparte. The 7 poems marked with an asterisk were never republished by Tennyson. The National Song was adapted for appropriate use in the Foresters (1892) and the rest were allowed to reappear from 1872 onwards in volumes where their status as juvenilia was made clear, except for To—, 2 stanzas of which were republished as My life is full of weary days in Selections, 1865. This poem had perhaps more significance for Tennyson than the others since it had been addressed to Hallam (Cambridge Apostles, pp. 258–259).

Note 70 in page 679 This group consisted of To — (J. W. Blakesley), Circumstance, the song *Every day has its night, *Chorus in an Unpublished Drama, *To a Lady Sleeping, *ol pioyres, and seven sonnets: *Could I outwear my present state of woe, *Though night has climbed her highest peak of noon, *The pallid thunder-stricken sigh for gain, *0 Beauty, passing beauty! sweetest sweet, *On the Polish Insurrection, As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, and On the late Russian Invasion of Poland. The poems marked with an asterisk were not republished by Tennyson. The last 2 sonnets reappeared as juvenilia in 1872.

Note 71 in page 679 See Appendix, pp. 687–697.

Note 72 in page 680 London Review, i (Westminster Review, xxx), July 1835, pp. 412–413.

Note 73 in page 680 See Appendix, pp. 689–690.

Note 74 in page 681 Tennyson's friend James Spedding attributed this purpose to the new conclusion (Edinburgh Review, LXVII [1843], 379). Spedding doubtless knew Tennyson's intentions. He had been a prominent adviser during the “Ten Years' Silence” and Tennyson had felt him to be “just the man” to review the 1842 volumes, “both as knowing me, and writing from clear conviction” (Memoir, p. 150).

Note 75 in page 681 Edinburgh Review, p. 379. 76 xxix (April 1833), 94.

Note 77 in page 681 Eleanore had been commended with some reserve by the Spectator (1832), the Monthly Repository and Review, and the London Review, and Mariana in the South by the Athenaeum. Though he deplored its lifelessness, Dwight had also found “sweet sad beauty” in this poem (Christian Examiner, xxiii [Jan. 1838], 323).

Note 78 in page 682 The Literary Gazette, No. 829 (Dec. 1832), 773, made this comment on ll. 52–88, carped at ll. 89–123, and called the whole poem “protracted and very mannered.” The New Monthly Magazine, xxxvii (Jan. 1833), 71, had censured ll. 82–88 for unintelligibility and “gratuitous affectation.”

Note 79 in page 682 See Appendix, pp. 692–693.

Note 80 in page 683 In Memoriam, Sec. LXVI, St. 2.

Note 81 in page 683 Christian Examiner, pp. 324, 325. Tennyson had been given similar advice by the Westminster Review, by Christopher North in Blackwood's Magazine, by the Monthly Repository and Review, the New Monthly Magazine (1833), and by Mill in the London Review.

Note 82 in page 685 It would appear from Fitzgerald's letter to Tennyson of 2 July 183S (Memoir, pp. 130–131), that the article on Tennyson in Le Voleur of 20 Dec. 1834, which had called him “jeune enthousiaste de l'école gracieuse de Thomas Moore,” and which Fitzgerald enclosed for his amusement, was the first French review of his work that Tennyson had seen. The poems of 1830 and 1833 had in fact been mentioned before that date in three other French periodicals, one of which was to print some further comment on Tennyson in 1839; but in the absence of any evidence that he saw any of these reviews, except the first-mentioned, which is inconsiderable, and in view of their evident dependence on opinions already voiced in this country, they have not been included in this study. I have not yet been able to trace the review mentioned in the Memoir (p. 112) as appearing in “far-off Calcutta,” apparently in 1834.

I have not listed the American review in the Dial, ii (July 1841), 135, since it is merely a brief laudatory notice, and contains no specific criticism.

Note 83 in page 686 The nature of this review does not lend itself to calculation, since it merely stated that the 1832 volume was inferior to its predecessor, and cited Eleanore as most on the level of the former volume.