University of Virginia Library

II

It was hardly to be expected that the Ode on the Death of the Duke

of Wellington would fully satisfy the reviewers' preconceptions, but their verdict was not unanimously hostile, as has generally been supposed.[17]

Anticipating the date of publication by a day, the magisterial Times, on Monday, November 15, treated the ode to a full column, which was widely reprinted, paraphrased, and plagiarized by metropolitan, provincial, and Scottish newspapers.[18] If "The Thunderer's" approach was somewhat condescending — "There is no affectation . . . in any of the lines . . . . [The poem] has more beauty than force, more sweetness and feeling than dignity and magnificence" — it found Tennyson "faithful to his mission" and quoted almost half of the poem. To introduce strophe VIII the reviewer wrote, "Never has . . . [the path of duty] been more simply and faithfully drawn than in the following lines."

On Wednesday, November 17, the Guardian, a liberal weekly, announced that the poem was not up to Tennyson's reputation. The subject was too grand and stern for his genius. Yet, though marred by some eccentricities of versification and "not a great production," the Ode was "dignified and graceful, full of tender and picturesque expressions, and in . . . metre generally melodious." The critic then quoted more than a third of the poem, commenting on several selections with such words as "a fine address to the two great men [Nelson and Wellington]," "a beautiful passage," "a striking one."[19]

Thursday, the day of the funeral, a short notice in the Fife Herald called the poem "a failure" — except for seventy-one lines comprising strophes VII and VIII, which were reprinted as a "noble passage."[20] But the impact of the Fife Herald upon public opinion was necessarily limited.

Extensive critical attention to the Ode began on Saturday, November

20, when eight London weeklies reviewed it. Among them Tennyson's reception was mixed.[21]

The Court Journal, which doted, it said, on "Locksley Hall," "The May Queen," "The Gardener's Daughter," and In Memoriam, found The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington "somewhat redeemed by scattered lines of great beauty and power" but "very far inferior to anything" that the poet had yet written. "Disdaining all rules of rhythm and metre, Mr. Tennyson has strung together a series of expressions, which read more like dislocated prose than verse, full of endless repetitions and sing-song rhymes."[22] The Weekly News and Chronicle was prepared to be disappointed and duly found itself so. "Why, there is not a provincial newspaper in any of our large cities that has not, within the last three months, received dozens of such lines. . . ," it declared.[23] The Leader, a sophisticated and liberal journal, founded two years earlier by Thornton Hunt and George Henry Lewes, judged the poem "an intrinsically poor performance."[24] The paper that had lauded In Memoriam and would welcome Maud believed the Ode a tissue of "common-place reflections," unrelieved by the "splendour of imagery befitting a great event."[25] Both conception and execution struck the critic, probably Lewes himself, as "insignificant."[26] In the Athenaeum, T. K. Hervey maintained a cordial tone but could not accept the poem as a poetical offering "commensurate with those other forms of honour which in life were lavishly bestowed" on the Duke of Wellington. Excusing Tennyson on the ground of haste, Hervey looked

for the poem to "be expanded into nobler proportions under the influence of longer time and added reflection."[27]

The Spectator informed its readers that Tennyson's ode was "hardly equal to its theme." While reverting to its recurrent complaint about Tennyson's mannerisms, affectation, and babyism, this periodical, nevertheless, contradicted both the Leader and the Weekly News and Chronicle. If there was nothing profound about the poem, there was nothing about it "poor or commonplace. . . . The ode, be its faults what it may, is the work of a poet; its structure, its treatment, its thoughts, its style, all are removed from mere versifying."[28]

Three other influential weeklies, the Atlas, the Examiner, and the Literary Gazette tendered unqualified praise. The Atlas asserted, "This ode will not disappoint the admirers of Mr. Tennyson's genius." Finding some of the stanzas equal to any in In Memoriam, the reviewer let the poet speak for himself in three passages totalling seventy-one lines.[29] The critic for the Examiner, presumably Tennyson's friend John Forster, assured his readers that, as poet laureate, Tennyson had been true to the occasion. As "grand and solemn" as the work was, so also was "the poet's simple strain of music . . . Exquisite for grace, pathos, and poetic fire, is the whole passage to Nelson; masterly the rapid and brief description of Wellington's victories." Forster contented himself with quoting only fifty lines, since "all Englishmen will read" the poem.[30] The Literary Gazette was panegyrical. The task of giving "voice to the emotions of the nation's heart, and the matured convictions of its judgment, in strains worthy of the great theme" was one to daunt "even the genius of Tennyson." But with a "lamentation simple, majestic, well-attempted, like the man himself," the poet had tendered a "fitting death-song" for the Great Duke.

Yet in order to illustrate the general nature of the poem, the Literary Gazette quoted in full six of the nine strophes of the poem and a part of a seventh — 166 lines in all!

In spite of this encomium Tennyson took a bleak view of his prospects and wrote to Moxon, "if you lose by the Ode, I will not consent to accept the whole sum of £200 . . . . I consider it quite a sufficient loss if you do not gain by it."[32] Responding, on November 23, to a letter of congratulation from Henry Taylor, Tennyson exclaimed: "Thanks, thanks! . . . In the all but universal depreciation of my ode by the Press, the prompt and hearty appreciation of it by a man as true as the Duke himself is doubly grateful."[33] The poet's vulnerability to derogatory criticism seems to have given him a distorted notion of his reception. Possibly he had not seen the Atlas and the Literary Gazette. Since he had counted on Forster's loyalty, perhaps the Examiner was little consolation.[34] He may have read too impatiently to discover favorable comments in other papers; and as he later remarked to James Knowles, "I remember everything that has been said against me, and forget all the rest."[35] Probably his hopes for a decisive critical success would have left him satisfied with little less than undivided acclaim. The equivocal reaction was a severe disappointment.[36]

When he wrote to Taylor, however, the response to the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington was not complete. The same day the Ayr Observer pronounced it worthy of the unique event it celebrated and evidence of "very considerable power";[37] but on November 26 the Dumfries-shire and Galloway Herald asseverated that the poem was not "equal to the occasion" and that Tennyson lacked the power "to smite a nation's heart" — though the paper succeeded in quoting more than half of his lines.[38] The next day the Illustrated London News, in a detailed critique signed J. A. H., deplored the laureate's ode.[39] Although this reviewer admitted that "in the midst of . . . poverty and humility of thought and style, there is an occasional beauty of phrase" and had no doubt that with time and leisure Tennyson would produce

"a fine poem" on the subject, he scorned the present offering: "the sentiments scarcely ever reach to the elevation of the theme," and "the injudicious style of expression lowers the best of them to the level of contemptuous familiarity, offensive to well-educated taste." Yet within four days, on December 1, the Critic, which only ten months before had printed George Gilfillan's excoriation of Tennyson, came stoutly to his defense.[40] The Ode had "been received with a very divided opinion — hearty praise and immoderate dispraise"; but fear of abuse from Tennyson's detractors would not prevent the Critic from registering its appreciation of a work which it found "perfectly Aeschylian. Thoughts too large for regular metre, but not less poetical on that account, lie heaped with all the gorgeous profusion of a Greek chorus." Finally, in January, 1853, the High Church English Review printed another enthusiastic critique of the ode — "in our judgment, a most masterly composition."[41] For this reviewer the poem displayed a union of "magnificence and sobriety" characteristic of Wellington; and the essay concluded with the following eulogy:

Obviously the severity of the critical reaction to the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington has been considerably overstated. When Tennyson wrote to Taylor of "the all but universal disparagement of my ode by the Press," he seems excessively to have discounted such friendly reviews as those in the Atlas, the Examiner, and the Literary Gazette, and characteristically to have disregarded many favorable remarks in other papers. At this time, moreover, the articles in the Critic and the English Review, which must have been balm to his wounded spirit, had not yet appeared. Even the derogatory reviews had, in every case, found some lines to quote with praise, and the newspapers had disseminated substantial excerpts from the poem throughout the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. From his letter to Moxon, Tennyson apparently assumed a reduced demand for the poem, owing to adverse criticism; but it seems likely that extensive

quotation in the newspapers may have lessened desire for the complete text.

In the middle of January 1853, Tennyson wrote somewhat dolefully to his wife that "only about 6000 of the Ode" had been sold.[42] Certainly, this figure was far short of the 10,000 that Moxon had anticipated, but it was not a meager one. After the author's honorarium and the costs of printing and distribution, the publisher still probably realized a small profit. At any rate, he was willing to hazard a second edition.

At the end of February or early in March 1853, he issued at one shilling another paper-bound octavo almost indistinguishable from its predecessor, except for a slight variation in the color of the binding and the words on both cover and title page — "A NEW EDITION."[43]