By 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson's second volume were circulating in MS. among his friends, and no poet ever had friends more encouraging. Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness among their acquaintance for effusions in manuscript, or in proof-sheets. The charmed volume appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced as "infamous" Lockhart's review in the Quarterly. Infamous or not, it is extremely diverting. How Lockhart could miss the great and abundant poetry remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of enabling him to praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and "preciosity," of which the new book was not destitute. He had been among Wordsworth's most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the "Cockney School" clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he DID repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, his censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, many passages of a fine absurdity criticised by the infamous reviewer. One could name great prose-writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous errors to which their attention was called by critics. Prose-writers have been more sensitively attached to their glaring blunders in verifiable facts than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste.
The Lady of Shalott, even in its early form, was more than enough to give assurance of a poet. In effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the same or a similar legend in Elaine. It has the charm of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities may have been really present to the mind of the young poet, aware that he was "living in phantasy." The alterations are usually for the better. The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to assert in the first form -"The yellow-leaved water-lily, The green sheathed daffodilly, Tremble in the water chilly, Round about Shalott."Nobody can prefer to keep "Though the squally east wind keenly Blew, with folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly Lady of Shalott."However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort -"All raimented in snowy white That loosely flew,"as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped from the airs of mysterious romance:-"They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest;There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits at Camelot."Hitherto we have been "puzzled," but as with the sublime incoherences of a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, "Bless my stars!" as perhaps we should also have done in the circumstances--a dead lady arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for "her blood was frozen slowly," as was natural, granting the weather and the lady's airy costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the young poet's vision broke up in this humorous manner. And, after all, it is less surprising that the Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book by a new young man, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of Mariana in the South, inspired by the landscape of the Provencal tour with Arthur Hallam.
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"O Love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips,"
and will observe Mr Browning's "Once he kissed My soul out in a fiery mist."As to OEnone, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. "It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie's Judgment of Paris," says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which "Quintus Calaber Somewhat lazily handled of old"may have reached Tennyson's mind from an older writer than Beattie.
He is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek myth as with the lamented "Minstrel." The form of 1833, greatly altered in 1842, contained such unlucky phrases as "cedar shadowy," and "snowycoloured," "marblecold," "violet-eyed"--easy spoils of criticism. The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the significance of OEnone's "I will not die alone," which in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as narrated in Tennyson's late piece, The Death of OEnone. The whole poem brings to mind the glowing hues of Titian and the famous Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera.
The allegory or moral of The Palace of Art does not need explanation.
Not many of the poems owe more to revision. The early stanza about Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and "Eastern Confutzee," did undeniably remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of The Groves of Blarney.
"With statues gracing that noble place in, All haythen goddesses most rare, Petrarch, Plato, and Nebuchadnezzar, All standing naked in the open air."In the early version the Soul, being too much "up to date,""Lit white streams of dazzling gas,"
like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.
"Thus her intense, untold delight, In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound, Was flattered day and night."Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter's experiments in gas, the "smell"gave him no "deep, untold delight," and his "infamous review" was biassed by these circumstances.
