“The poplars four
That stood beside his father’s door,”
the Somersby brook, and the mills and granges, the seas of the
Lincolnshire coast, and the hills and dales among the wolds, for
Cambridge. He was well read in old and contemporary English literature,
and in the classics. Already he was acquainted with the singular
trance-like condition to which his poems occasionally allude, a subject
for comment later. He matriculated at Trinity, with his brother Charles,
on February 20, 1828, and had an interview of a not quite friendly sort
with a proctor before he wore the gown.
That Tennyson should go to Cambridge, not to Oxford, was part of the
nature of things, by which Cambridge educates the majority of English
poets, whereas Oxford has only “turned out” a few—like Shelley. At that
time, as in Macaulay’s day, the path of university honours at Cambridge
lay through Mathematics, and, except for his prize poem in 1829, Tennyson
took no honours at all. His classical reading was pursued as literature,
not as a course of grammar and philology. No English poet, at least
since Milton, had been better read in the classics; but Tennyson’s
studies did not aim at the gaining of academic distinction. His aspect
was such that Thompson, later Master of Trinity, on first seeing him come
into hall, said, “That man must be a poet.” Like Byron, Shelley, and
probably Coleridge, Tennyson looked the poet that he was: “Six feet high,
broad-chested, strong-limbed, his face Shakespearian and with deep
eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark wavy hair, his head finely
poised.”
Not much is recorded of Tennyson as an undergraduate. In our days
efforts would have been made to enlist so promising a recruit in one of
the college boats; but rowing was in its infancy. It is a peculiarity of
the universities that little flocks of men of unusual ability come up at
intervals together, breaking the monotony of idlers, prize scholars, and
honours men. Such a group appeared at Balliol in Matthew Arnold’s time,
and rather later, at various colleges, in the dawn of Pre-Raphaelitism.
The Tennysons—Alfred, Frederick, and Charles—were members of such a set.
There was Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, from Eton; there was
Spedding, the editor and biographer of Bacon; Milnes (Lord Houghton),
Blakesley (Dean of Lincoln), Thompson, Merivale, Trench (a poet, and
later, Archbishop of Dublin), Brookfield, Buller, and, after Tennyson the
greatest, Thackeray, a contemporary if not an “Apostle.” Charles
Buller’s, like Hallam’s, was to be an “unfulfilled renown.” Of Hallam,
whose name is for ever linked with his own, Tennyson said that he would
have been a great man, but not a great poet; “he was as near perfection
as mortal man could be.” His scanty remains are chiefly notable for his
divination of Tennyson as a great poet; for the rest, we can only trust
the author of _In Memoriam_ and the verdict of tradition.
The studies of the poet at this time included original composition in
Greek and Latin verse, history, and a theme that he alone has made
poetical, natural science. All poetry has its roots in the age before
natural science was more than a series of nature-myths. The poets have
usually, like Keats, regretted the days when
“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,”
when the hills and streams were not yet “dispeopled of their dreams.”
Tennyson, on the other hand, was already finding material for poetry in
the world as seen through microscope and telescope, and as developed
through “æonian” processes of evolution. In a notebook, mixed with
Greek, is a poem on the Moon—not the moon of Selene, “the orbed Maiden,”
but of astronomical science. _In Memoriam_ recalls the conversations on
labour and politics, discussions of the age of the Reform Bill, of
rick-burning (expected to “make taters cheaper”), and of Catholic
emancipation; also the emancipation of such negroes as had not yet tasted
the blessings of freedom. In politics Tennyson was what he remained, a
patriot, a friend of freedom, a foe of disorder. His politics, he said,
were those “of Shakespeare, Bacon, and every sane man.” He was one of
the Society of Apostles, and characteristically contributed an essay on
Ghosts. Only the preface survives: it is not written in a scientific
style; but bids us “not assume that any vision _is_ baseless.” Perhaps
the author went on to discuss “veridical hallucinations,” but his ideas
about these things must be considered later.
It was by his father’s wish that Tennyson competed for the English prize
poem. The theme, Timbuctoo, was not inspiring. Thackeray wrote a good
parody of the ordinary prize poem in Pope’s metre:—
“I see her sons the hill of glory mount,
And sell their sugars on their own account;
Prone to her feet the prostrate nations come,
Sue for her rice and barter for her rum.”
Tennyson’s work was not much more serious: he merely patched up an old
piece, in blank verse, on the battle of Armageddon. The poem is not
destitute of Tennysonian cadence, and ends, not inappropriately, with
“All was night.” Indeed, all _was_ night.
An ingenious myth accounts for Tennyson’s success: At Oxford, says
Charles Wordsworth, the author was more likely to have been rusticated
than rewarded. But already (1829) Arthur Hallam told Mr Gladstone that
Tennyson “promised fair to be the greatest poet of our generation,
perhaps of our century.”
In 1830 Tennyson published the first volume of which he was sole author.
Browning’s _Pauline_ was of the year 1833. It was the very dead hours of
the Muses. The great Mr Murray had ceased, as one despairing of song, to
publish poetry. Bulwer Lytton, in the preface to _Paul Clifford_ (1830),
announced that poetry, with every other form of literature except the
Novel, was unremunerative and unread. Coleridge and Scott were silent:
indeed Sir Walter was near his death; Wordsworth had shot his bolt,
though an arrow or two were left in the quiver. Keats, Shelley, and
Byron were dead; Milman’s brief vogue was departing. It seemed as if
novels alone could appeal to readers, so great a change in taste had been
wrought by the sixteen years of Waverley romances. The slim volume of
Tennyson was naturally neglected, though Leigh Hunt reviewed it in the
_Tatler_. Hallam’s comments in the _Englishman’s Magazine_, though
enthusiastic (as was right and natural), were judicious. “The author
imitates no one.” Coleridge did not read all the book, but noted “things
of a good deal of beauty. The misfortune is that he has begun to write
verses without very well understanding what metre is.” As Tennyson said
in 1890, “So I, an old man, who get a poem or poems every day, might cast
a casual glance at a book, and seeing something which I could not scan or
understand, might possibly decide against the book without further
consideration.” As a rule, the said books are worthless. The number of
versifiers makes it hard, indeed, for the poet to win recognition. One
little new book of rhyme is so like another, and almost all are of so
little interest!
The rare book that differs from the rest has a _bizarrerie_ with its
originality, and in the poems of 1830 there was, assuredly, more than
enough of the bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epithets, and
words like “tendriltwine” seemed provokingly affected. A kind of
lusciousness, like that of Keats when under the influence of Leigh Hunt,
may here and there be observed. Such faults as these catch the
indifferent eye when a new book is first opened, and the volume of 1830
was probably condemned by almost every reader of the previous generation
who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of fifty-six pieces only
twenty-three were reprinted in the two volumes of 1842, which won for
Tennyson the general recognition of the world of letters. Five or six of
the pieces then left out were added as _Juvenilia_ in the collected works
of 1871, 1872. The whole mass deserves the attention of students of the
poet’s development.
This early volume may be said to contain, in the germ, all the great
original qualities of Tennyson, except the humour of his rural studies
and the elaboration of his Idylls. For example, in _Mariana_ we first
note what may be called his perfection and accomplishment. The very few
alterations made later are verbal. The moated grange of Mariana in
_Measure for Measure_, and her mood of desertion and despair, are
elaborated by a precision of truth and with a perfection of harmony
worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from the natural
scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of
the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness
of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. _Isabel_ (a
study of the poet’s mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately
dignity; while _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_ attest the power of
refined luxury in romantic description, and herald the unmatched beauty
of _The Lotos-Eaters_. _The Poet_, again, is a picture of that which
Tennyson himself was to fulfil; and _Oriana_ is a revival of romance, and
of the ballad, not limited to the ballad form as in its prototype, _Helen
of Kirkconnell_. Curious and exquisite experiment in metre is indicated
in the _Leonine Elegiacs_, in _Claribel_, and several other poems.
Qualities which were not for long to find public expression, speculative
powers brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions,
were attested by _The Mystic_, and _Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate
Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself_, an unlucky title of a
remarkable performance. “In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we
find the soul urging onward
‘Thro’ utter dark a full-sail’d skiff,
Unpiloted i’ the echoing dance
Of reboant whirlwinds;’
and to the question, ‘Why not believe, then?’ we have as answer a simile
of the sea, which cannot slumber like a mountain tarn, or
‘Draw down into his vexed pools
All that blue heaven which hues and paves’
the tranquil inland mere.” {16}