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Notes
"A Note on the Variants of In Memoriam and Lucretius," The Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 269-273; "Tennyson's Lucretius," The Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 63-64.
Letters to Macmillan (1967), pp. 112-114. Just when Grove, who for some time had assisted David Masson, the founding editor of Macmillan's Magazine, actually succeeded him has been variously dated from 1867 to May, 1868 (see under Masson, DNB, 2nd supplement [1912], II, 583; Charles L. Graves, The Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan [1910], p. 280; and Graves, The Life and Letters of Sir George Grove [1903], p. 156). Professor William E. Buckler argues from Masson's name's appearing as editor on volume 17 (which ends with the number for April, 1868) that he had the "decisive judgement" in the expurgation of the Oread ("Tennyson's Lucretius Bowdlerized?" RES, NS, 5 [1954], 269, n.8). In fact, on December 20, 1867, Macmillan wrote Masson to terminate his editorship. Although the publisher found the necessity of doing so "very painful," Masson's absence in Scotland (he had been elected Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh in 1865) made it increasingly difficult to conduct the magazine. Macmillan proposed to keep Masson on a £100 yearly retainer, in return for which he would write four or five articles. If they reached more than 50 pages, he would be paid by the page, at the rate of £2 a page for the overage. His name would be retained as editor to the end of the volume, and no one else's would then appear, though Grove would take over the editorial duties. Macmillan expressed his hope that Masson would continue a friendly interest in the magazine and would be willing from time to time to give opinions on articles and make suggestions when called upon (British Library, Add. MSS. 55842, fols. 90-92v; since all references hereafter to Add. MSS. are to letters in the archives of Macmillan and Co. in the British Library, I do not repeat their location in succeeding documentation). Although Masson's reply does not appear in the Macmillan files, he seems to have acceded to these terms. The correspondence shows that by Jan. 13, he sent Macmillan a mass of articles which he had been holding, and that Grove had the editorial authority to decide upon the contents of the February issue (Add. MSS. 55387 (2), fol. 880). In a letter of Feb. 3, 1868, to Edmund Lushington (see below), Macmillan refers to Grove as having "just taken the Editorship." There can be no question, as the present article demonstrates, that Grove was editorially responsible for "Lucretius" from beginning to end.
For permission to print from autograph material, I am indebted to the Lord Tennyson, Mr. W. S. G. Macmillan, Macmillan Administration (London and Basingstoke) Ltd., the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the authorities of the British Library, the Tennyson Research Centre Collection, the Lincolnshire Library Service, Harvard University, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, the Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, the University of Virginia, Wellesley College, and Yale University.
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (1897), II, 28; hereafter cited as Memoir.
Sir Charles says that Good Words "gave no less than £700 for The Victim" (Tennyson, p. 374). See below for the financial arrangements with Macmillan's.
Grove first met Tennyson in 1854, when, with a letter of introduction from his brother-in-law, George Granville Bradley (afterwards Dean of Westminster), he went to Farringford, as Secretary of the Crystal Palace, to seek an inaugural ode on the re-opening of the Palace at Sydenham. He was unsuccessful in his mission; but the poet received him cordially, and the "result . . . was the beginning of a truly delightful and valuable friendship . . ." (Graves, Grove, p. 45). At the end of 1867, Macmillan also enjoyed a cordial relationship with Tennyson of over eight years' standing. Since the publication of Poems, 1842, he had been a keen admirer of the poet, whom he met, according to Sir Charles, in Cambridge some time in September, 1859 (Tennyson, p. 320; see also Memoir, I, 442). The two were soon quite at ease with one another (see Macmillan's letter to James MacLehose in Graves, Macmillan, pp. 133-134). In launching Macmillan's Magazine, the publisher and Masson spent "'three glorious days with Tennyson' in the Isle of Wight" and received the promise of "Sea Dreams," which appeared in the second issue of the magazine, 1 (December, 1859), 191-198 (Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1843-1943) [1943], p. 57). In the same issue (1, 114-115), Macmillan, under his pseudonym "Amos Yates," made a spirited defense of Maud in response to Gladstone's derogatory comments on that poem in his review article of the first four Idylls of the King, published in the Quarterly Review, 106 (1859), 454-485. In the early 60's, Tennyson was a frequenter of Macmillan's celebrated Tobacco Parliaments at 23 Henrietta St., Covent Garden. See Graves, Macmillan, p. 151, and Morgan, pp. 50-53.
In printing letters, I observe exactly the orthography and punctuation (or lack of it) in the original (or in the printed text, when the MS original is not available) with the following exceptions: I use double quotation marks for all quotations and titles in quotation marks, regularly indent paragraphs, put postscripts at the end of letters (regardless of where they actually appear), separate the "A" and the "T" of "Tennyson," which the poet often wrote together in his signature, and omit the underlining or partial underlining that sometimes occurs as a terminal flourish under Macmillan's signature. To save space, I put the letterheading address on a single line and do not reproduce publishers' full printed or embossed letterheads. The texts of Macmillan's outgoing letters derive from transcripts in his letter books. From the handwriting, it appears that in 1867-68 one or the other of two clerks in his office copied into the letter book each letter before it was posted. The paper of the letter books if of poor quality, and in some instance the ink has run and blurred badly.
The amounts paid for each poem, here first published, were omitted when the letter was printed in Letters of Alexander Macmillan, ed. George A. Macmillan (1908), pp. 236-237.
I have been unable to verify the text of the first reading, since the MS apparently has not survived in the Macmillan archives.
The poem is a variant version of "A voice spake out of the skies," finally published in The Death of Oenone, Akbar's Dream, and Other Poems (1892). See The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (1969), p. 1193. There is no reference to these lines in the Macmillan-Grove correspondence. Perhaps, since they did not publish the poem, they felt it so slight as to detract from the impact of "Wages," which they regarded highly. In addition to their remarks about "Wages" quoted above, Macmillan declared to Grove, "Tennysons poem is grand. I wish someone could write a commentary on it" (Add. MSS. 55387(2), fol. 880 [Jan. 13, 1868]). Despite the willingness expressed here to accede to Macmillan's preference for the first reading, Tennyson soon decided that "flying by" was the better one, and the text in Macmillan's followed his judgment.
The "Büchner" to which Macmillan refers is Louis Büchner, Force and Matter: Emperico-Philosophical Studies, Intelligently Rendered, ed. J. Frederick Collingwood (1864), an English translation of Friedrich Carl Christian Ludwig Büchner's Kraft und Stoff. This copy of Büchner is in the poet's library at the Tennyson Research Centre (Tennyson in Lincoln, comp. by Nancie Campbell [1971], I, 36, No. 654).
This undated letter, which is in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, is misdated "February" in Letters to Macmillan, p. 112.
For a bibliographical description of this MS and the other MSS and proofs compared in this article, see the Bibliographical Note below. Although Paden asserts that this MS is not in Tennyson's wife's hand (p. 269, n.3), there can be no doubt that it is in her autograph, and the evidence of Tennyson's letter above is conclusive.
Since the notice does not seem to have appeared, Dasent may have refused it; but the likelihood is that, in view of Tennyson's distress over the advertisements of the poems which were published in Good Words and Once a Week, Grove never offered the announcement, or that if he did, he withdrew it.
After 1864, J. Bertrand Payne was manager of Edward Moxon & Co., the firm that had published Tennyson since 1832. See Harold G. Merriam, Edward Moxon: Publisher of Poets (1939), p. 194.
In addition to Alexander Strahan, previously identified as the publisher of Good Words, the persons to whom the letter refers are Eneas Sweetland Dallas, editor of Once a Week; Edmund Lushington, Tennyson's brother-in-law and a professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow; James T. Knowles, the architect of Aldworth, editor of the Contemporary Review and later of the Nineteenth Century; and Thomas Woolner, the sculptor.
The asterisk indicates that the word or words following it are the reading to which the description in square brackets applies. See F. Bowers, "Transcription of Manuscripts: The Record of Variants," Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 212-264.
Line references in parentheses refer to the authoritative text in the Eversley Edition: The Works of Tennyson, annotated Alfred Tennyson, ed. Hallam Tennyson, 9 vols. (1907; rpt. 1908), II, 198-209.
It is possible that one of the fifteen, "heart" changed from "breast" (240), may not be an actual miscopying on Emily Tennyson's part but an alteration that the poet introduced in correcting MS3 and simultaneously made on MS2.
This line continued to cause the poet difficulty, as his corrections on the page proofs reveal. After returning to the reading of MS2, he finally perceived before "Lucretius" was published that not the carelessness of the gods was what needed emphasis but, in view of their heedlessness of man, Lucretius' recognition of the irrationality and philosophical contradiction of his actually imploring them. And thus Tennyson reached the final reading, "I know you careless, yet, behold, to you".
See Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., and Christopher Ricks, "A Further History of Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington: the Manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Galley Proof at Lincoln," SB, 32 (1979), 125-157.
According to Hallam Tennyson's note in the Eversley Edition (II, 362-363), the change to "neat-herds" resulted from a suggestion by the classical scholar, Hugh A. J. Munro, whose edition and translation of De Rerum Natura was published in 1864 (T. Lucreti Cari de Rerum Natura Libri Sex, with a Translation and Notes, 2 vols.).
In an unpublished portion of a letter at Harvard to Benjamin Paul Blood, May 7, 1874, Tennyson wrote that "What is duty?" "was altered because Lucretius nowhere I think makes any mention of Duty in that sense. . . ." But the Laureate returned to the idea and the expression and even intensified it in the final version of the line in The Holy Grail volume (see below).
From the textual evidence, one must conclude that Tennyson did not return P2 to Grove or to Macmillan. Although its possession by a descendant of Alexander Macmillan may seem to suggest the contrary, the present owner's grandmother was a daughter of Sir John Simeon, Tennyson's neighbor and intimate friend on the Isle of Wight, and was the poet's goddaughter (see a letter from Mr. W. S. G. Macmillan to Sir Charles Tennyson, April 4, 1966, in the Tennyson Research Centre). Either she or her father likely received it as a memento from the author.
Ricks is quite right in asserting that this letter, though it is now physically with P2, cannot refer to that proof; and without the evidence of P3, his surmise that the letter applied to an anterior proof was a reasonable one (The Library, pp. 63-64).
I have disregarded the uncorrected duplicate in numbering the proofs leading to the text in Macmillan's but have described it in the Bibliographical Note. Two copies of the slip containing the alternate version of the Oread passage accompany this proof and have not been tipped in.
When Nowell-Smith printed this letter from the Berg Collection, he omitted the address, which is in black embossed letters (Letters to Macmillan, p. 114). The date is in Emily Tennyson's hand in slightly different ink from the body of the letter. She wrote "March" over her "Feb" false start. Although Masson's preference on critical grounds for the short form of the Oread may have reinforced Grove's and Macmillan's judgment, he too was aware, as he put the matter, "of what that blatant beast, the public, might say about the longer form of the passage" (see Buckler, pp. 269-270); and Ricks is certainly correct that the decision to use the alternative reading was made on grounds of squeamishness (The Library, p. 64). Malcolm Macmillan says that Charles Kingsley remonstrated with the poet "about some descriptive lines as being too warm, and tending to revive the fashion of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists," and that as a consequence they were excised (Selected Letters of Malcolm Kingsley Macmillan [1893], p. 291). This notion is manifestly in error, as is Thomas J. Wise's contention that Tennyson cancelled the full passage because of Robert Buchanan's article, "The Fleshly School of Poetry," in the Contemporary Review for October, 1871 (see Paden, p. 271, n. 3).
Although the text in Every Saturday also shows the commas after "wilderness," (204) and "hour," (258) that Tennyson added on P5, it fails to reflect a semicolon for a comma at the end of line 132 and commas for semicolons in "A satyr, a satyr," (192), which he also introduced in that proof. All three of these accidentals in Every Saturday conform to the uncorrected text of P4.
Besides these three and the three cited in the previous note, the other ten instances in which the text in Every Saturday agrees with P4 and not with P5 as corrected are the following: "Storm and what dreams ye holy gods, what dreams," for "Storm, and what dreams, ye holy Gods, what dreams!" (33), "Cadmeän" for "Cadmean" (50), "direct" for "direct," (62), "scorn" for "scorn," (77), "wish" for "wish—" (205), "life—" for "life." (218), and "will" for "will," (220). Every Saturday followed American practice in spelling ("philter", "labor", "havoc", "neighbors") and expanded all Tennyson's elisions, as in "thro'" and in the endings of past participles. Its text also varies from either proof in having a semicolon instead of a comma after "spit" (132) and a comma instead of a semicolon after "I" (235)—punctuation that may be deliberate but that more likely represents lapses by the American compositor. His "impurpled" for "empurpled" (135) is an accepted variant spelling, but "Beccause" (68) and "Gods." instead of "Gods," (92) are both typographical errors. Regrettably, no proof of "Lucretius" seems to be extant in the records of Houghton Mifflin Co., the successors of Ticknor and Fields, which are now in the Houghton Library at Harvard. I am indebted for this information to Mr. Patrick Miehe, the cataloger of these archives.
There is an uncorrected proof copy of "Lucretius" in the Beinecke Library at Yale University that has the period after the title. Since the text in substantives and accidentals (except for a missing exclamation mark at the end of 1. 279) is identical with that printed in Macmillan's, I have disregarded this state in the Historical Collation; but I have provided a complete description of it in the Bibliographical Note.
The Pall Mall Gazette for April 29 was the 1000th number of the paper, a milestone that the publisher and the editor celebrated with a dinner for the literary staff at the Garrick Club (see J. W. Robertson Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette [1950], pp. 175-176). Greenwood, along with John Morley, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Tom Hughes, Thomas Huxley, Henry Sidgwick, and Sir Arthur Helps, was a guest at an All Fools' Day dinner given by Macmillan on April 1, 1868 (Scott, pp. 183-184). No doubt personal relationships played a part in the favorable advance coverage from the Pall Mall Gazette.
On Dec. 29, 1865, Macmillan wrote to Gladstone, "The Spectator . . . is perhaps the ablest and most influential of the weeklies" (Graves, Macmillan, p. 243). See also William B. Thomas, The Story of The Spectator, 1828-1928 (1928).
The Illustrated Times expressed the hope of "giving a few words of special notice next week" to "Lucretius" but failed to do so until May 30. By that time the poem had been "so fully criticised" by other journals, the Illustrated Times said, that it merely remarked upon the work's exhibiting "at least one example of every mannerism of the poet" and upon its remarkable "individuality of style" (12, 398).
Richard Claverhouse Jebb, later Regius Professor of Greek and one of the most distinguished scholars of his epoch, was at this time a brilliant young Classics don at Trinity College, Cambridge. Himself an "Apostle," he had met Tennyson in the previous year at a dinner party given at the Master's Lodge by the poet's college friend, William Hepworth Thompson, then the Master of Trinity (Caroline Jebb, The Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb [1907], pp. 93-94). Their acquaintance flowered in a friendship of mutual respect and regard; and in 1889 Tennyson prefaced "Demeter and Persephone" in Demeter and Other Poems with an introductory poem to Jebb. Whether Jebb's article on the historical accuracy of Tennyson's characterization of Lucretius, scheduled for publication in Macmillan's for June, was invited by Macmillan or initiated by Jebb, it seems probably to have stemmed from the reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette, who asserted the correspondence of Tennyson's Lucretius with his Roman original but disclaimed having the space—"in a little journal like ours"—to elaborate the point. Just the thing, however, for a "scholarly" magazine like Macmillan's; and the publisher was not one to miss such an opportunity. Writing to Jebb on May 1, he inquired, "Have you done anything to your Article on Lucretius yet? We will gladly put it into type and let you make what alterations you care in it" (Add. MSS. 55388(1), fol. 312). By May 7, Jebb had sent the MS, and Macmillan assured him that he should "have proof in good time for correcting" (fol. 325). On May 12, the piece was in type; and Macmillan wrote, after seeing the first proof, urging Jebb to mention Matthew Arnold by name in his comparison of Empedocles and Lucretius (fol. 344)—a suggestion that Jebb followed. The reference to Clapham is apparently to James Knowles's house, The Hollies, Clapham Common.
The Nation, an American journal, published in New York, damned with faint praise: "'Lucretius' . . . seems tolerably successful. . . . Of the general situation the pathos is well enough set forth; not too well; not so well that the poem is at all a great one, or more than a clever, learned, well-finished one" (6 [April 30], 352-353). For this reviewer bringing in Lucilia at the conclusion saved the poem "from being quite a dull one," and he wished that Tennyson had made more of the protagonist's discovery at the end that he was the "victim really of a foolish woman and a vile drug." A single line that the Nation mentioned as metrically objectionable was one of those resulting from the compositor's errors, "And tickling the brute within the man's brain" (21). The Cosmopolitan (1865-76) was a weekly paper of news, politics, commerce, literature, art, and society, published on Saturday. No copy for May 2 or May 9 exists in British or American libraries.
The History of The Times: the Tradition Established, 1841-1884 (1939) identifies Dallas as the author (p. 483).
"A riotous confluence of water courses", "Ruining along the illimitable inane," "Hired animalisms, vile as those that made", and "All-seeing Hyperion—what you will—".
See his letter, March 2, 1868, above. Nearly a half-century ago, E. A. Osborne described a set of page proof for the Holy Grail volume, then belonging to Mr. W. A. Foyle, in which Tennyson had not yet altered the Oread passage and the last line of the poem from the readings in Macmillan's (TLS, August 25, 1932, p. 596).
There were twenty-nine alterations in accidentals from the text in Macmillan's to that in the Holy Grail volume (sixteen of them had to do with quotation marks) and ten such variations between the Holy Grail and Eversley. (See Paden for a few variants in intermediary editions between the Holy Grail and Eversley, [pp. 271-272].) "That", which was the original reading, stood until Tennyson changed it to "And" in P2 and P3, when he inserted line 260. Ricks considers "That" in Eversley to be a mistake (The Poems of Tennyson, p. 1217); and in the one-volume Macmillan edition (1913) that Hallam Tennyson edited and that incorporates the author's notes from Eversley, the text reverts to "And" (p. 164). In my textual comparisons I have, of course, disregarded Thomas J. Wise's forgery, which he described in A Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1908), I, 191-192, and in The Ashley Library: A Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts, and Autograph Letters Collected by Thomas James Wise (1925), VII, 129. John Carter and Graham Pollard documented this alleged state as spurious in An Inquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934), pp. 305-306.
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