University of Virginia Library

III

Whether or not the galley proof in the Tennyson Research Centre (P1) is the single proof that Grove ordered Clay to pull, one cannot say; but it is the earliest surviving printed text of the poem and was set directly from MS3. There are eight compositor's errors. Four—"toils" for "tales" (130), "want" for "wont" (209), "Fanishing" for "Vanishing" (257), and "fairy's" for "Fury's" (261)—the poet corrected; four others—"proæmion" for "proœmion" (70), "hand" for "hands" (220), "backwards" for "backward" (221), "O Thou" for "for O Thou" (264)—went unmarked. The accidentals (if one disregards and's in the proof for ampersands in MS, as I do throughout) show some thirty-seven variants in this proof from MS3. The compositor cannot always have been certain about Emily's orthography and intention concerning commas, periods,

and dashes; and he did not hesitate to introduce punctuation where there was none in the MS, to alter punctuation where he thought it desirable to do so, to change single quotation marks to double, to reduce several initial capitals to lower case, to capitalize in at least one instance of lower case, and eight times to expand to full endings of ed and ough words such as "Cracked" and "through", which in MS, according to Tennyson's custom, were written "Crack'd" and "thro'". Inconsistently, though, the proof reproduced twenty-seven such endings as they had appeared in MS3 and had "shatter'd" for "shattered" (250).

These variations in accidentals the poet disregarded except in the passage concerning the Oread (188-192). The compositor, making the description of her stand alone as a sentence and wrenching the meaning by introducing a query in line 192, had set the passage thus:

The poet's pen lowered two capitals and repunctuated these lines to read: The corrections reflect the poet's firm intention that the physical description of the Oread be parenthetical and that "who this way runs" be a statement of the direction and the nature of her motion instead of a query as to her identity or a question (which the compositor and Grove—see below—seem to have wanted) leading to the introduction of the satyr. The latter interpretation made no sense, since the satyr could not both run before the rest and follow. Despite Tennyson's diligent attention to the details of the passage, he failed to note "slipping" that Emily in MS3 had miscopied for "slippery" and the hyphen that she had omitted from "bosom-peaks". Yet in the immediately preceding lines he deleted the plural s that she had given to "Nymph" and to "Faun" (187) and decided to change dashes to commas in line 186.

Since none of these emendations appears in the next state of the text, it is unlikely that P1 was returned to the editor; and certainly the type for the first page proof cannot have been corrected from it. There must, however, have been another galley on which Grove or Clay remedied

the four obvious typographical errors that Tennyson had marked, for these read correctly in the first two subsequent proofs extant, though the other four mistakes by the compositor persist.

All later surviving proofs are page proofs. Collation reveals that the set belonging to Mr. Macmillan (P2) and the first of those in the Berg Collection (P3) were pulled from the same type. But Tennyson's corrections in P3 advance it considerably further toward the ultimate text than do those on P2. Including the bowdlerized version of the Oread, which Ricks has described, there are ninety-two alterations, both substantives and accidentals, on P2 and ninety-nine on P3. Sixty-eight are common to both proofs, and there are fifty-five variant changes between them. But the next proof recognizes all the corrections on P3 and none of the variants on P2. The following substantive corrections (with their associated accidentals) that are not on P2 appear on P3:

             

Letterpress of P2 and P3	Tennyson's Altered Reading on P3
goatherds	neat-herds (88)[23]
I know you careless, yet	Careless, I know you careless, yet
to you, to you,	to you (208)[24]
Strike	Dash (246)
. . . "It is done;	. . . "Care not thou!
What matters? What is duty? . . .	What matters? All is over: . . .(279-280)[25]

Tennyson probably received P2 and P3 as duplicate sets of proof and began correcting one of them (P2), where he first altered a comma to a period after his name and struck out "POET LAUREATE." under it. When he came to the Oread—the passage was still punctuated exactly as it had been in P1—he set off the full description of her with a dash over the period after "Oread", a parenthesis before "How", and a closed parenthesis instead of a period after "peaks". He changed "slipping" to "slippery" and gave the hyphen to "bosom-peaks". He also made the capital in "Who" lower case, removed the unwanted question mark after "rest", added a dash, and altered the dashes after each "satyr" to commas. Thereupon, or as the result of reconsideration later, he heavily

excised lines 188-192 and inserted in the margin in their place: "And here an Oread—& this way she runs | Before the rest—A Satyr, a Satyr, see, | Follows;". After revising this proof extensively, he apparently abandoned it and made all his corrections for the printer on the duplicate (P3).[26] In doing so, he did not systematically transfer his corrections from one proof to the other, since, including the deleted "POET LAUREATE." and the alternate lines about the Oread, twenty-four changes on P2 are not to be found on P3.[27] (Conversely, there are thirty-one changes on P3 that do not occur on P2.) Having decided to let the full account of the Oread stand, he once again on P3 repunctuated the lines (this time using dashes alone for the parenthetical description), corrected "slipping" to "slippery", hyphenated "bosom-peaks", and reduced "How" as well as "Who" to lower case. In P3 as in P2, he revised the typographical errors: "proæmion" to "proœmion" and "O thou" to "for O Thou"; but he still overlooked the compositor's "hand" for "hands" and "backwards" for "backward".

Several of the substantive alterations introduced on both proofs require comment. Two added lines—"The fire that left a roofless Ilion," (65) and "That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel," (260)—enrich the allusiveness of the contexts in which they appear; and transposing lines 211-212 to relate to each other so—"No lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey-spite | No madness of ambition, avarice, none;"—improved the order and logical progression of the evils that Lucretius believes he has escaped. In describing the effect of the philter upon Lucretius, Tennyson not only varied the syntax, which had repeated that of the line before, but enhanced both the scientific accuracy and the conflict between the human and the bestial in Lucretius by substituting for

the reading Replacing "to drink" with "to take" (214), in the passage about drinking with neighbors on the grass, muted any note of excess that the former verb might carry and furthered the tone of moderation and restrained enjoyment. In another instance, while regularizing a foot in the line of blank verse may have been a factor, concern over the fleshliness of the poem seems to have led him to excise "Naked" in describing the Hetairai (52).

Without doubt Tennyson's letter to Macmillan, dated Shrove Tuesday, 1868 (February 25), which belongs to Mr. W. S. G. Macmillan and which Ricks first published, refers to P3 and may have accompanied it to the publisher.[28] In this letter the author said:

Then there is a postscript across the top of the sheet, "I left in the Oread —do you wish her out?"

When Macmillan wrote two days later, he referred to this letter. By some means Tennyson had conveyed to Grove and Macmillan the expurgated version of the Oread and had expressed a wish for the poem to appear in larger type than that of articles in the magazine:

As a result of Macmillan's decision to enlarge the type (he went from 9 to 10 point and increased the leading between lines), a complete resetting, with its consequent opportunity for compositor's errors, was necessary. Moreover, the larger type and more generous leading expanded the text onto an additional page, though it is wanting in the next Berg proof (P4). This proof, which Tennyson never saw, contains the full description of the Oread with all the corrections that he made

in it on P3. Clay sent P4 to Grove with the notation in ink, written across the top of the first page, "A few suggestions in punctuation | are submitted in this proof | RC". When Grove had finished his review of Clay's suggestions and had made his own corrections, he returned the proof with the printer's note struck out and this direction in ink above it: "2 revises to Mrr Grove by return Feb. 29". Since the ink and width of pen differ, it is clear which are Clay's and which are Grove's proofreading marks.

Grove approved all Clay's suggestions and made two revisions of his own in accidentals (removal of a diacritical mark over the second a in "Cadmeän" [50] and substitution of a period for a dash at the end of a line [218]). There were three egregious errors, however, that Clay had failed to recognize. Although Grove marked them, and they were corrected, they eventually corrupted the text as published in America. The first two resulted from the compositor's misunderstanding of emendations on P3. Instead of the intended, "And tickling the brute brain within the man's", he set, "And tickling the brute within the man's brain". "Careless", which Tennyson wrote at the beginning of the line before "I" (208), he substituted for a deleted "to you", so that the wording became, "I know you careless, yet careless, to you". In the third instance (209), he simply misread "childly wont" in P3 and put "chilly want". One other typographical error eluded Grove—a w for an h, making "halls" into "walls" in "windy halls of heaven" (136).

Grove's and Clay's emendations were accomplished that day, and the two revises which the editor had ordered were sent back to him (a tab pasted on the uncorrected one bears Clay's name and the date "Feb. 29, 1868."). These proofs still contained the full description of the Oread (188-191), but the expurgated version with the succeeding line about the satyr ("And here an Oread—and this way she runs | Before the rest—A Satyr, a Satyr, see") had been printed on a slip of paper, which, forming an overlay for lines 188-192, had been tipped in at the righthand end on the set that went to Tennyson (P5).[29]

Grove dispatched this proof to the author on March 2, accompanied by the following letter:

One of the editor's two queries in the margin of P5 suggested a semicolon instead of a comma after "nor" in line 132. Tennyson let the comma stand by crossing out Grove's marks; but the question stimulated him to change the comma at the end of the line to a semicolon. The second query appears to have proposed a period to replace a dash at the end of line 248. The poet also rejected this alteration, though one should note that he did not demur to any of the accidentals that Clay and Grove had contributed to the text on P4.

Tennyson disregarded most of the strictures in Grove's letter, but he changed "hand" to "hands" (220) and "afresh" to "anew" (246). The editor's still wanting to read "who this way runs | Before the rest" as a question doubtless prompted him to set these words off in the long version by parentheses in preference to the existing dashes. Also, in the full text he converted the semicolons in "A satyr; a satyr;" (192) to commas. "To peer behind the laurels" became "What?—that the bush were leafless?" (206); and deleting the initial "careless" and inserting "behold", set off in commas after "yet" (208), at last solved that troublesome line. "Kupris" he made "Kypris" (95). Further, he contracted "although" to "altho'" (133), added at the ends of lines 204 and 205 a comma and a dash respectively, and inserted a comma after the last word of line 258.

The next day he returned P5 to Grove with this letter:

Despite the concern for decorousness that Tennyson's removing "To peer behind the laurels" indicates, he stood by his own preference for the unexpurgated Oread by drawing a slanting vertical line from left to right across the tipped-in alternative. When this proof came back from the author, it went to the printer with the notation in ink in the upper left-hand corner, though not in Grove's hand, "3 Revises | instantly."

After Tennyson's corrections on P5 had been set, "Lucretius" had all but reached its final state for Macmillan's Magazine. On March 4, Mrs. Tennyson wrote Fields to tell him that her husband had requested Grove to send him "Lucretius" "by the next mail tho' it is not to be published until May" (University of Virginia). Grove must have conveyed one of the revises of P5 to Tennyson, who also wrote Fields in these words:

Contrary to Tennyson's belief that the poem had already gone to America, a week apparently elapsed before it was in fact posted to Fields along with a letter from Macmillan, dated March 17, 1868, in which he wrote:

It is odd that in spite of Tennyson's injunction to Grove about sending the full Oread to America, Macmillan included the alternative version, without any indication as to the poet's preference, and that he professed himself still undecided as to which lines to use in Macmillan's after what both he and the editor had previously written to Farringford. At any rate, Tennyson turned out to have judged the Americans correctly.

From Macmillan's letter one would assume that he sent Fields a proof pulled from the type after Tennyson's corrections on P5 had been made, with the expurgated Oread tipped or folded in. (It had been approximately two weeks since three revises instantly had been called for.) And, indeed, except for the emendation of line 208 to read "I know you careless, yet, behold, to you", all Tennyson's significant changes on P5 had been incorporated when the poem appeared in America: "Kypris", "What? that the bush were leafless?", "hands", "backward", "anew", and the description of the Oread set off in parentheses instead of dashes.[31] Yet one of the two proofs mailed to Fields, through some unaccountable mistake, must have been an uncorrected or incompletely corrected duplicate of P4, for sixteen readings in the letterpress of that proof, both substantives and accidentals, that Clay, Grove, or Tennyson had altered either on P4 or P5 appeared in Every Saturday. These included the three major blunders by the compositor in setting P4: "And tickling the brute

within the man's brain" (21), "I know you careless, yet careless, to you" (208), and "chilly want" (209).[32]

After receiving Tennyson's letter of March 10 that a proof of "Lucretius" had been sent, Fields, on March 30, informed the poet that it had not arrived and requested a duplicate immediately (Add. MSS. 54986, fol. 209v). When this news reached Farringford, Emily Tennyson, on April 13, addressing her letter to Grove or Macmillan, asked that "another copy of Lucretius" be sent "by the Thursday's post" (Add. MSS. 54986, fol. 207). The next day Macmillan responded:

His confidence was of course misplaced, and the copy of the first sheet of the magazine cannot have reached Fields before Every Saturday went to press or presumably some of the errors would have been rectified.

A proof of the first octavo gathering of Macmillan's, which bears Tennyson's autograph in the upper right-hand corner of the first page (P6), is extant in the Berg Collection. It embraces all Tennyson's alterations on P5, and "halls" (136) shows correctly. In addition, there are three variants in punctuation that he had not marked for change: "abroad:" has become "abroad;" (88), "spit," appears as "spit—" (132), and "Oread—" reads "Oread," (188). The only proofreader's marks on P6 are a stroke under the comma after "LUCRETIUS," in the title, and "q." in the right-hand margin. The query seems to be the printer's rather than the editor's or Tennyson's. A period replaced the comma when the poem appeared in Macmillan's.[33]

At the end of April, when the May issue was at last published and on the very day that the first review appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan wrote thus to Emily Tennyson:

To Macmillan's letter of March 15, Fields replied good-humoredly as follows: