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Tennyson and the Reviewers 1830–1842

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edgar Finley Shannon Jr.
Edgar Finley Shannon Jr.*
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

Much has been written about the influence of the early reviewers on Tennyson. Professor Lounsbury, who has made the only real printed effort at a scholarly analysis of the question, believed the influence to be very slight. I shall attempt here to collect and sift the evidence afresh and to determine as clearly as possible the part which the reviewers played in Tennyson's ten-years' silence after the publication of his first two independent volumes (1830, 1833), in his revisions and suppressions of poems in them, and in his choice of subjects and expression of ideas in the new poems of 1842.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 1943 , pp. 181 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1943

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References

1 Those who assert emphatically the effect of the critics are: Robert Browning, a letter of February, 1845, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London, 1900), I, 18–20; Charles Astor Bristed, Knickerbocker Magazine, xxv (June, 1845), 536; Mary Gordon, Christopher North: a Memoir of John Wilson ‘Edinburgh, 1862), ii, 175–176; Henry Van Dyke, The Poetry of Tennyson (New York, 1889), pp. 28–32, 36, 38–42; Henry J. Jennings, Lord Tennyson (London, 1892), p. 30; Andrew Lang, The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (New York, 1897), ii, 88; Stephen Gwynn, Tennyson: a Critical Study (London, 1899), pp. 31–32; Andrew Lang, Alfred Tennyson (New York, 1901), pp. 21–22; Sir Alfred Lyall, Tennyson (New York, 1902), pp. 15, 26; “The Centenary of ‘The Quarterly Review’,” The Quarterly Review, ccx (April, 1909), 773–774; Aaron Watson, Tennyson (London, 1912), pp. 26, 33; Hugh I'Anson , Tennyson: a Modern Portrait (New York, 1923), pp. 49, 56; F. L. Lucas, Eight Victorian Poets (Cambridge, 1930), p. 6. Less positive in general are: Arthur Waugh, Alfred Lord Tennyson: a Study of His Life and Work (London, 1892), p. 65; J. Cuming Walters, Tennyson: Poet, Philosopher, Idealist (London, 1893), pp. 43–44; Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character, and Poetry (London, 1925), pp. 91–92, 117–118; Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Poet as Citizen and Other Papers (New York and Cambridge, 1935), pp. 169–170. All of these writers consider only North's review in Blackwood's and “Lockhart's” in the Quarterly.

2 Thomas R. Lounsbury, The Life and Times of Alfred Tennyson (New Haven, 1915), pp. 333–336, 400–113.

3 I have failed to discover two reviews of the 1830 volume mentioned in the Atlas review of the 1833 volume, December 16, 1832, as having appeared in the London Magazine and the Examiner. It seems likely that the reviewer for the Atlas, writing hurriedly and relying on memory, erroneously ascribed two of the early reviews to periodicals in which they did not appear. The Examiner might have been confused with the Taller, but I am at a loss to suggest a periodical that might have been confused with the London Magazine. I have thus far been unable to find a review referred to in the Memoir, i, 134, under date of June, 1834, as “lately published” in Calcutta. Two French reviews of Tennyson, in L'Europe Littéraire, March 6 and 15, 1833, and Le Voleur, December, 1832, I have not included in my study.

4 I have used the reprint in The Poems of Arthur Henry Hallam Together with his Essay on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson, ed. Richard Le Gallienne (New York and London, 1893), pp. 87–139.

5 Select Journal of Foreign Periodical Literature, ii (July, 1833), 106–121, reprinted Croker's review. This review has generally been ascribed to John Gibson Lockhart. For discussion and proof of Croker's authorship see “The Centenary of ‘The Quarterly Review’,” ccx (April, 1909), 775–776 note and a letter by H. J. C. Grierson, TLS, xxxvi (April 24, 1937), 308.

6 Memoir, i, 49.

7 Memoir, i, 74–75.

8 In a letter to North, Memoir, i, 95.

9 Memoir, i, 94, 122.

10 Memoir, i, 70.

11 Memoir, i, 134.

12 Lounsbury, pp. 333–336.

13 Tennyson gives a poetic representation of this period of his life in the third stanza of “Merlin and the Gleam”: “Once at the croak of a Raven who crost it,” etc.

14 Memoir, i, 145. In February, 1834, John Lake published a poem directed against North and defending Tennyson. Fearing that this would incite North to a vitriolic reply, Tennyson requested that he not be suspected of having any sympathy “with the ravings of this unhappy coxcomb.”

15 Memoir, i, 145.

16 The Keepsake for 1837 but published in November, 1836.

17 Athenœum, November 5, 1836, p. 786.

18 Edinburgh Review, lxvi (October, 1837), 108.

19 Blackwood's, xxxix (February, 1836), 265–266; xxxix (May, 1836), 578–579. William Lyon Phelps believes that the remarks of S. C. Hall about Tennyson in The Book of Gems, London, 1838, were also a factor in Tennyson's continued silence. See Modern Language Notes, xxix (April, 1914), 126–127.

20 Cf. Memoir, i, 165–166. There can be little doubt that, as Lounsbury has pointed out, Tennyson was spurred by the threat of a reprinting of his first volumes in America, though he pretended not to care. See letter to Fitzgerald, Memoir, i, 178.

21 Memoir, i, 180.

22 Lounsbury argues that Hallam's death did not deter Tennyson from writing new poems which he could have published; but the son says that when urged by Frederick to publish in the spring of 1835, “he would not and could not; his health since Hallam's death had been ‘variable, and his spirits indifferent‘” (Memoir, i, 138). As early as 1834 Tennyson wrote Spedding, “… I have corrected much of my last volume, and if you will send me your copy I will insert my corrections” (Memoir, i, 141). Though Tennyson had progressed with alterations of his old poems before John Stuart Mill wrote his critique, July, 1835, he was doing exactly what Mill suggested; cf. London Review, i, 423–424.

23 Memoir, i, 122.

24 Lounsbury, p. 401.

25 In arriving at this figure I have counted any poem that received condemnation by any one reviewer. In most instances the reviewers were outspoken and there is no question. There are several borderline cases where the reviewers were not quite explicit or where admission was made of some merit. Such were “The Dirge,” “Claribel,” and the “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” but I have included them, since it would be better to admit reasonable possibilities than to risk misrepresenting the evidence. In deciding these borderline cases the criterion has been whether the sum of a reviewer's comments indicate a serious disapproval or stricture. Accordingly “Oriana,” for instance, has not been included among the twenty-four, though Hunt commented that he thought the name, running all through the poem, too often repeated.

26 Harold Nicolson, op. cit., pp. 92–93, states that nine criticized poems were reprinted, evidently meaning in 1842. His figures and facts, however, based on North's review alone, are so confused that it is difficult to know how to correct them. In the first place North criticized unfavorably eighteen instead of seventeen poems, and of these Tennyson reprinted six in 1842. When Nicolson goes on to name the nine which he claims were reprinted, he names only seven, including two, “All Things Will Die” and “Nothing Will Die,” which were actually not reprinted in 1842. Among criticized poems published eventually, he mentions “The Dying Swan,” which was one of the six reprinted in 1842. If by any chance Nicolson did not make himself clear and meant that finally, but not necessarily in 1842, Tennyson reprinted nine, he is still inaccurate, for regardless of date, Tennyson reprinted twelve of the poems which North dismissed.

27 “Love and Sorrow,” condemned by the Atlas, is the only poem not censured by a review which we know Tennyson saw.

28 North, Blackwood's, xxxi (May, 1832), 740.

29 There were also four sonnets among the seventeen uncriticized poems, but they could not have been left out because of their shortness. Yet their suppression may be explained by the fact that only one of his sonnets was praised and several were criticized. The praised sonnet, “To J. M. K.” was the only sonnet from either of the early volumes reprinted in 1842. See discussion of sonnets of the 1833 volume below.

30 All of these poems were criticized in reviews that Tennyson assuredly saw. In fact, Croker attacked them all except “Who can say.”

31 These figures differ from Lounsbury's, for his statements are based on the Quarterly review alone.

32 Lounsbury, p. 401.

33 Memoir, i, 96.

34 Memoir, i, 50n.

35 I have not included in my list poems cited in their entirety by the reviewers except when specific words in such poems were condemned. Where there seems to be a definite point of criticism concerned with each italicized word or group of words, I have considered each a separate criticism. Where three or four consecutive lines were cited with several italicized words or phrases but where the reviewer seemed to be pointing to the passage as a whole, I have considered it one criticism. As the poems of 1830 were relatively short, the reviewers dealt with that volume mainly by poems, so that only eleven passages were cited from them.

36 North charged Tennyson in the line, “Thou art a mailed warrior, in youth and strength complete,” from “The Grasshopper,” with absurdity and with plagiarism from Wordsworth's conception of a beetle as “A mailed angel on a battle day.” Tennyson's whole poem hinged upon the idea of the “mailed warrior.” The other passages in poems not reprinted were in five short poems only. Eight lines of the sonnet, “Buonaparte,” were cited as unintelligible; all three stanzas of “O Darling Room” were satirized; and there were six points singled out in “The Hesperides,” eight in the sonnet, “Mine be the strength,” and nine in “To —” (All good things).

The final disposition of the twenty-eight passages in poems not reprinted in 1842 seems to show the effects of criticism carried over to a later date. Five of these passages were changed or omitted when the poems were reprinted and ten were in poems never reprinted.

37 It might still be argued that as it is not absolutely certain that Tennyson saw all the reviews, my figures are not beyond the pale of coincidence. If then we use only passages criticized by Croker, North, Hallam, Mill, and Hunt, whose reviews he undoubtedly saw, we find that fifteen of thirty-four passages in poems reprinted were altered or omitted and twenty-four (I except “Kate”) were in poems not reprinted—a total of thirty-nine out of fifty-eight passages corrected or suppressed. With Croker's review alone the tally is thirty-four out of forty-seven.

In certain cases it may very well be that Tennyson's maturer judgment coincided with the critics' objections, and that his alterations were a result of both influences. These cases cannot be clearly distinguished, but the admission weakens my position very little.

38 Miss Helen Pearce has graciously afforded me the privilege of reading her unpublished dissertation at the University of California, The Criticism of Tennyson's Poetry, a Summary with Special Emphasis upon Tennyson's Response to Criticism as a Factor in the Development of his Reputation; but the discussion in these pages has been developed independently, and her treatment and mine are not similar.

39 Memoir, i, 188–189.

40 Edinburgh Review, lxxvii (April, 1843), 377.

41 North had deplored these—“National Song,” “English War-Song,” and “We Are Free”—and wished that the young poet had written patriotic poems of real power.

42 Memoir, i, 123.

43 Memoir, i, 123. The italics are mine.

44 Westminster Review, xiv (January, 1831), 223–224.

45 Blackwood's Magazine, xxxi (May, 1832), 725.

46 New Monthly, xxxvii (January, 1833), 74. The italics are mine.

47 Monthly Repository, n. S. vii (January, 1833), 41.

48 London Review, i (July, 1835), 422.

49 Christian Examiner, xxiii (January, 1838), 327.

50 Ibid., p. 325.

51 Ibid., p. 324. The last italics are mine.