SOURCE: Day, Aidan. “The Spirit of Fable: Arthur Hallam and Romantic Values in Tennyson's ‘Timbuctoo’.” The Tennyson Research Bulletin 4, no. 2 (November 1983): 59-71.

[In the following essay, Day analyzes Hallam's Timbuctoo and Tennyson's poem of the same name. Day concludes that Tennyson's poem is influenced considerably by Hallam's version.]

In attempts to identify external factors which may help account for the Romantic bias marking Tennyson's 1829 Cambridge Prize Poem “Timbuctoo” commentators tend to refer only to general influences: the broad currency of Romantic ideas at Cambridge in the late 1820s and the special enthusiasm for Romantic literature among members of the Society known as the Apostles. I shall suggest in the following discussion that in his conception of Romantic values in “Timbuctoo” Tennyson was indebted specifically to notions advanced by Arthur Hallam. Much has been made of the formative role played by Hallam in Tennyson's early intellectual and artistic development. “Timbuctoo” may be seen in some measure to confirm this view. But the poem also reveals a significant ambiguity in Tennyson's response to Romantic ideology. My further purpose in this essay will be to provide a detailed examination of this element of ambiguity and show that it furnishes us with an important insight into the limits of Hallam's influence over his friend's thought and imaginative concerns.

Hallam claimed to have exercised a very considerable influence over Tennyson's prize-winning poem. In a letter of 25 June 1825 J. M. Gaskell wrote:

I received a letter this morning from Hallam. He is delighted that Tennyson is successful. He says that Tennyson deserved it, but that he borrowed the pervading idea from him. …¹

Hallam's claim looks extravagant when we recall that Tennyson's “Timbuctoo” was largely made up out of an earlier work, “Armageddon,” the first version of which he had composed before going up to Cambridge and before meeting Hallam. Yet it seems likely that Hallam would have made his claim in full knowledge of this fact. On 16 September 1829 he replied to a letter sent him by John Frere:

I cannot agree with you bye the bye that Alfred's poem is not modelled upon [Shelley's] Alastor, nor by any means that it is a specimen of his best manner. The bursts of poetry in it are magnificent; but they were not written for Timbuctoo; and as a whole, the present poem is surely very imperfect.²

“Armaggedon” was first published by Sir Charles Tennyson in Unpublished Early Poems by Alfred Tennyson (London, 1931), pp. 6-15 (hereafter 1931). From the manuscript used by Sir Charles (now Harvard MS. Eng. 952.2) it had appeared that less than 50 lines had been incorporated from “Armaggedon” in “Timbuctoo.” But Christopher Ricks has noted that a different version of “Armaggedon” in a notebook at Trinity College, Cambridge (MS. 0.15.18; hereafter T.Nbk.18) shows that “Broadly, the whole central vision of ‘Timbuctoo,’ from l. 62 … to l. 190 … was present, with some trivial variants, in ‘Armaggedon.’”³ Clearly, the cannibalisation was massive and Tennyson's own comment that he “sent in an old poem” with a new beginning and ending⁴ and Hallam's assertion that Tennyson borrowed from him the “pervading idea” of “Timbuctoo” might well appear contradictory and mutually exclusive claims. But Tennyson's alterations of “Armaggedon” in the making of “Timbuctoo” were more significant than a simple count of the number of new lines in the new poem would reveal. These alterations may best be understood, and the nature and scope of Hallam's probable influence over Tennyson's work best appreciated, through, first, an examination of the basic features of Hallam's own submission for the 1829 Prize Poem competition, second, an examination of “Armaggedon,” and finally a consideration of the winning entry in the light of this preliminary discussion.

.....

Hallam's Timbuctoo is laboured and derivative. The poet acknowledges his models by means of his epigraph, taken from Wordsworth's “Yarrow Unvisited,” and through his extensive notes to the poem.⁵ Not all echoes are formally noticed but the principal influences discernible in the work are those of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge. Hallam's conversion of these influences into an almost systematised external authority in Timbuctoo marks a significant difference in imaginative effort between the poem and the Romantic texts which it invokes. Hallam reveals little of the confidence in self-derived authority and little of the innovative and exploratory impulse of his Romantic mentors. His composition reads like a versified treatise on the imagination and we should be hard pressed to recognise in it that “vital union” between language and figure⁶ which we take to be a distinguishing feature of the fully realised Romantic poem. Attempting to press an unsystematic body of literature into a systematised framework, Hallam betrays in Timbuctoo an eclectic reliance on his Romantic models and an apparent lack of awareness of differing individual attitudes and ideas which lead to amalgamations that are reductive to the point of cliché. Without dwelling on these negative aspects of the poem its overt conceptual and imaginative affiliation may be indicated.

Summarising the opening theme of his poem in lines 82-97, Hallam complains that his is an age witnessing a decline in the spiritual and imaginative energies of mankind. He observes that the “‘veiled maid’” (l. 84) and “every thing that makes us joy to be” (l. 87) have vanished, overwhelmed by “the world's o'ershadowing form” (l. 95). He recalls the Wordsworth of the “Immortality Ode” (l. 18) as he declares that “there hath passed away a glory of Youth / From this our world; and all is common now” (ll. 88-89). In a note on his reference to the disappearance of the “‘veiled maid’” in the text of Timbuctoo privately printed in 1829, Hallam explains that this is an allusion to “the exquisite personification of Ideal Beauty in Mr. Shelley's Alastor.” In an expanded note on the allusion in the text of the poem published in his edition of Poems, 1830, Hallam suggests that the critics may determine how far he has the right

to transfer the “veiled maid” to my own Poem, where she must stand for the embodiment of that love for the unseen, that voluntary concentration of our vague ideas of the Beauty that ought to be, on some one spot, or country yet undiscovered. …

This note directs us to the second movement of Hallam's argument in Timbuctoo, in which we learn that despite the signs of impoverishment, the spiritual dispossession of mankind is not quite complete: “there is one, one ray that lingers here, / To battle with the world's o'ershadowing form” (ll. 94-95). Hallam refers us to the fabulous City of Timbuctoo. We are told that in this “City divine” (l. 129) which “yet no mortal quest hath ever found” (l. 102), it is possible still to find “th' ideal aliment / Of Man's most subtle being” (ll. 107-108); in this territory of the mind may

                                                                                still be blent
Whate'er of heavenly beauty in form or sound
Illumes the Poet's heart with ravishment.

(109-11)

An imaginative projection of “Man's most subtle being,” the City expresses the fundamental identity of the human mind with “the Eternal Reason's perfectness” (l. 117). What Henry Hallam called “the Platonic spirit” of his son's “literary creed”⁷ shows itself in Hallam's adumbration of an idealistic epistemology in Timbuctoo. As might be expected, however, in a work which bears a specifically Romantic orientation, Hallam places special emphasis on the imagination as a cognitive organ which provides insights into an order of reality transcending the phenomenal world. Nor is it surprising, when Hallam describes those moments of “phantasy” (l. 144) in which he has a clear intuition of the inhabitants of Timbuctoo, that his account should in some measure substantiate Northrop Frye's observation that “the metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward, hence the creative world is deep within, and so is heaven or the place of the presence of God.”⁸ This world at the deep centre is not a condition that is easily realisable or recoverable, but it is a state that stands over and against the demands of the world of time and space and the energy that is required for its attainment is something that may be represented in ideal terms. In lines 161-63 of Hallam's Timbuctoo we hear that the imagined inhabitants of the City gathered around “a good old man” (who is styled, Hallam informs us in a further note, on Coleridge) and drank

          The sweet, sad tones of Wisdom, which outran
The life-blood, coursing to the heart, and sank
          Inward from thought to thought, till they abode
          'Mid Being's dim foundations, rank by rank
With those transcendent truths arrayed by God
          In linked armor for untiring fight,
Whose victory is, where time hath never trod.

(165-71)

Hallam's Timbuctoo also bears witness to the importance of what Northrop Frye has termed the “Atlantis theme” in Romantic metaphors of depth and interiority.⁹ At the very opening of the poem we find that the legendary lost Atlantis, while “still an Eden, shut from sight” (l. 38), while retaining, that is, its integrity as a region of the mind, was simply a variant type of the “‘veiled maid’” as a traditional expression of the creative imagination:

There was a land, which, far from human sight,
          Old Ocean compassed with his numerous waves,
          In the lone West. Tenacious of her right,
Imagination decked those unknown caves,
          And vacant forests, and clear peaks of ice
          With a transcendent beauty …

(1-6)

The opening theme of Hallam's poem has been that this particular myth or poetic image has become unavailable to man. In describing the loss of Atlantis as a region of the mind, Hallam recalls Wordsworth's preoccupation, in The Excursion, with the demythologising influence of rational, scientific knowledge.¹⁰ In The Excursion the problem is explored both in terms of the private experience of the individual (the loss of the “visionary powers of eye and soul / In youth,” IV. 111-12), and in terms of mankind's loss of an aboriginal innocence; the loss of the world of the Chaldean Shepherds, for example, when “The imaginative faculty was lord / Of observations natural” (IV. 707-08). Against the minute and speculative inquiries of the sceptical intellect the Wanderer opens his famous protest, comparing modern habits of thought with the mythopoeic conceptions of the pagans of old time:

          ‘Now, shall our great Discoverers,’ he exclaimed,
Raising his voice triumphantly, ‘obtain
From sense and reason less than these obtained,
.....Enquire of ancient Wisdom; go, demand
Of mighty Nature, if 'twas ever meant
That we should pry far off yet be unraised;
That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,
Viewing all objects unremittingly
In disconnexion dead and spiritless …’

(IV. 941-43, 957-62)

For Hallam, in Timbuctoo, the discovery of the Americas and the post-Columban reduction of “phantasmal” (l. 64) Atlantis into a literal and rationally exploitable new world stand as an image of the dissipation of the radiant forms of the imagination;—a vanishing, in Hallam's terms, of the “‘veiled maid.’” Hallam, however, does not follow Wordsworth's pattern of maintaining a clear distinction (though simultaneously exploring the analogies) between the personal loss of a period of imaginative integrity and the wider cultural loss that is associated with the disruption, through the emergence of a historical consciousness, of a mythical world view. In Timbuctoo we can at best only infer the private, individual experience of deprivation from Hallam's account of the failure of the myth of Atlantis. Hallam's construct does not allow for a detailed investigation, in the manner of Wordsworth, into the forces which threaten the successful working of the individual creative or mythopoeic imagination in a world that is separated by history from the resources of a living mythical tradition.

The structure of Hallam's poem endeavours, however, to enact a typically Romantic programme of spiritual decline and recovery. Assuming a Romantic position concerning the redemptive role of the imagination, Hallam identifies in its workings a principle of order which transcends and compensates for the breakdown of human continuities in the realm of natural process and ordinary historical time. Following the Wordsworth of the “Immortality Ode,” who finds that although the ecstasy may have passed, the “habitual sway” (l. 195) of nature and his own “primal sympathy” (l. 185) are not lost, and like the Wanderer of The Excursion who, taught by nature's “humbler power” (IV. 1190), finds still a leavening and a creative power in the “imaginative Will” (IV. 1128), Hallam anticipates the conclusion of his poem at its outset and sees the “transcendent beauty” associated with the working of the imagination as

                                                                                          that which saves
From the world's blight our primal sympathies,
          Still in man's heart …

(6-8)

Finding assurance in the thought that the undiscovered City of Timbuctoo bears witness to the abiding power of the imagination, Hallam ends his poem on a note of confidence. He quotes line 42 of “Tintern Abbey” and thus invokes that Wordsworthian mood in which “laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul: / … We see into the life of things” (“Tintern Abbey,” ll. 45-46, 49):

                                                                                Ever may the mood
“In which the affections gently lead us on”
Be as thy sphere of visible life.

(193-95)

.....

Christopher Ricks has described Tennyson's poem “Armageddon” as “a fragmentary vision of the last great battle, with a Miltonic angel as expositor.”¹¹ Certainly, Milton is the prevailing influence and we find that the seraph of the poem, identified in the opening lines with the Spirit of Prophecy, fulfils to some extent a conventional role within the terms of traditional vision poetry as the vehicle and symbol of a grace which is dispensed to man from without. Thus it appears that perception is cleansed in the “bright descent / Of a young seraph” (II. 1-2) whose words, addressed to the speaker of the poem, seem to imply a higher authority for visionary experience than the speaker himself (II. 10-16). There follows, however, a curious process of identification between speaker and Spirit which, at its furthest development, threatens to erase the distinction between a faculty that is divinely bestowed and one that is purely self-expressive:

                                                                                          I looked, but not
Upon his face, for it was wonderful
With its exceeding brightness, and the light
Of the great Angel Mind …
I felt my soul grow godlike, and my spirit
With supernatural excitation bound
Within me, and my mental eye grew large
.....Yea! in that hour I could have fallen down
Before my own strong soul and worshipped it.

(II. 16-19, 21-23, 49-50)

An overt scheme of transcendental reference based on metaphors of externality is maintained in “Armaggeddon” but is subverted by the manner in which the speaker's acknowledgement of the power of the Spirit of Prophecy tends always to move towards a celebration of his own prophetic spirit. It is hard to believe Tennyson was unaware that he was confusing orders of reality in a way which would not have been possible for Milton, yet the poem as a whole does not show a convincing sense of direction. It confuses and is confused. Tennyson certainly attempted to find an adequate rationale for the position of the speaker in “Armaggedon,” but he achieved only a shaky formulation when he had his Spirit of Prophecy declare:

‘O Everlasting God, and thou not less
The Everlasting Man (since that great spirit
Which permeates and informs thine inward sense,
Though limited in action, capable
Of the extreme of knowledge—whether joined
Unto thee in conception or confined
From former wanderings in other shapes
I know not—deathless as its God's own life,
Burns on with inextinguishable strength) …’

(III. 1-9)

The fact that neither of the extant manuscripts of “Armageddon” constitutes a complete poem is perhaps indicative of Tennyson's inability to resolve the conceptual confusions and difficulties inherent in the work.

.....

The large spiritual claims made for the human speaker in “Armageddon” provide, nevertheless, a clear basis for the assertions of “Timbuctoo.” In refashioning a vision of the battle of Armageddon—a subject necessarily invested with some of the ideas and values of the Biblical tradition from which it is drawn—into a vision of the City of Timbuctoo and in modifying the context of significance in which the vision is set by completely re-writing the opening and closing passages of the poem, Tennyson may be seen to be exploring a new language for the definition and expression of “mystical” or visionary experience. The speaker at the outset of “Armageddon” asserts the impossibility of painting in language the supernatural things seen by him. Not only is this “past the power of man” (I. 20), but also

                                                                      No fabled Muse
Could breathe into my soul such influence
Of her seraphic nature, as to express
Deeds inexpressible by loftiest rhyme.

(I. 20-23)

By contrast, in “Timbuctoo,” the seraph of the vision becomes a personification of man's expressive and creative capacities. In this poem it is precisely the Spirit of Fable, regarded as impotent in “Armageddon,” which makes possible the vision of the City, as these lines from the newly composed conclusion make clear:

          ‘There is no mightier Spirit than I to sway
The heart of man: and teach him to attain
By shadowing forth the Unattainable;
.....I play about his heart a thousand ways,
.....                                                                                … I am the Spirit,
The permeating life which courseth through
All the intricate and labyrinthine veins
Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread
With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare,
Reacheth to every corner under Heaven,
Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth …’

(191-93, 201, 215-21)

In his conception of this organic tutelary Spirit Tennyson has moved towards an internalisation of the agency of transcendental insight in terms consonant with Romantic notions concerning the mythopoeic or poetic imagination. Within the newly formulated conceptual frame of the poem, the central vision undergoes a transformation in its nature, source and status, functioning explicitly as a testament to the capacity of the human imagination to apprehend and to generate metaphors for the infinite and the ideal.

Writing about the central vision section of “Timbuctoo,” Christopher Ricks has pointed out that “Armageddon” includes “some extra lines, so that the MSS. do not present us with the uninterrupted sequence of lines, ‘Timbuctoo’ ll. 62-190.”¹² Most noticeably, Tennyson omitted in “Timbuctoo” a number of lines from the vision section of “Armageddon” which had made absurdly grandiose claims for the scope and authority of individual human insight. Possibly Tennyson was content to let the new frame of the poem, which makes clear the interior, imaginative grounds of spiritual perception, do the work more discreetly. Thus, lines 40-50 in section II of “Armageddon” (beginning “I wondered with deep wonder at myself” and ending “I could have fallen down / Before my own strong soul and worshipped it”) do not appear in “Timbuctoo.” The “trivial variants” noted by Ricks between the vision sequence of “Armageddon” on the one hand, and that of “Timbuctoo” on the other, also show a desire on Tennyson's part to reduce, in his later poem, some of the more exaggerated postures of his earlier work. Lines 25-27 in section II of “Armageddon” had read:

                                        … I seemed to stand
Upon the outward verge and bound alone
Of God's omniscience.

In “Timbuctoo” (ll. 92-94) these lines were altered to: “… the outward verge and bound alone / Of full beatitude.” Similarly, the opening words of line 21 in section II of “Armageddon,” “I felt my soul grow godlike,” became in “Timbuctoo”: “I felt my soul grow mighty” (l. 88). These trivial modifications between “Armageddon” and “Timbuctoo” contribute to an important overall difference between the two poems. Through the excisions and alterations in the vision sequence as it stood in “Armageddon,” and by the entirely new opening and conclusion to the work, “Timbuctoo” becomes a poem in which the word “God” is never used. The difficult question, which had arisen for Tennyson in “Armageddon,” of how best to define the place of a cosmically expanded human mind in relation to a God who must retain at least some of His traditional attributes, is thus avoided in “Timbuctoo.”

The confusion in accommodating the vision in “Armageddon” to a mode of inward metaphorical structures does not entirely disappear in “Timbuctoo.” However, the very fact that Tennyson chose, in his later poem, to interpret the theme set by the Cambridge examiners as a vision of the City of Timbuctoo, where the vision constitutes an assertion of the power of the faculty of imagination, suggests an exploration of new modes. It certainly provides a striking parallel with Hallam's work.

The general argument of Hallam's poem is also paralleled in Tennyson's work. Tennyson's “Timbuctoo,” like Hallam's, begins with a reference to “Divinest Atalantis” (l. 22), which is presented as a place that had its “being in the heart of Man / As air is the life of flame” (ll. 19-20) but which, like the fabled Eldorado, is for the speaker an unavailable dream of “ancient Time” (l. 61). The same is true in the following lines (also from Tennyson's newly composed introduction to the poem) of the legendary Blessed Isles of the West:

                                                                                Where are ye
Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands green?
.....Where are the infinite ways, which, Seraph-trod,
Wound through your great Elysian solitudes,
Whose lowest deeps were, as with visible love,
Filled with Divine effulgence, circumfused … ?

(40-41, 46-49)

Like Hallam, Tennyson then turns his attention to “the rumour of … Timbuctoo” (l. 60) as surviving evidence of that same apprehending sense manifest in ancient fable.

The parallels between the poems of Hallam and Tennyson are an indication that Tennyson's exploitation of an essentially Romantic mode and language in “Timbuctoo” may owe something to his friend's enthusiasm for the writers of that school, and may reflect discussions of aesthetic theory between them. I have noted Tennyson's apparent uncertainty of direction in “Armageddon.” It seems very possible that Hallam may have provided an interpretation of Romantic views of mind and imagination in which Tennyson was able to perceive conceptual or theoretical solutions to some of the problems which he had encountered in “Armageddon,” and which enabled him to establish in “Timbuctoo” an organising frame for material he had been unable to order satisfactorily in the earlier poem.

Tennyson's “Timbuctoo” does not contain the overt gestures towards a theoretical ground that are evident in Hallam's work. This fact seems to point to an important difference in sensibility between the two. Without going so far as to agree with Tennyson that his own “Timbuctoo” is “unmethodised,”¹³ we can perhaps say that while Tennyson may have been attracted to an area of theoretical consistency in Hallam, his imaginative responses would seem to have been merely conditioned rather than contained by any system of ideas propounded by his friend. For we find in Tennyson's poem an imaginative extension, exploration and complication of the theoretical simplicities manifest in Hallam's Timbuctoo. While Tennyson's Timbuctoo may be, like that of Hallam, a City of the imagination, there is a development in Tennyson's argument which has no equivalent in Hallam's ultimately comfortably circumscribed treatment of the same subject. The idea that literal discovery results in an impoverishment of imaginative power is introduced in Tennyson's work after the apparent affirmation of that power in the speaker's glimpse of Timbuctoo. As the Spirit of Fable finally calls attention to his “fair City” (l. 245) he foresees the “river” which winds through its streets “not enduring / To carry through the world those waves, which bore / The reflex” of the City “in their depths” (ll. 225, 233-35). He envisages the onset of a world that exists in “disconnexion dead and spiritless” (The Excursion, IV. 962) as the wasted imagination, in the face of Discovery, fails to maintain its idealising and unifying activity:

                                                                      ‘the time is well-nigh come
When I must render up this glorious home
To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand …’

(238-43)

Forsaken by the Spirit of Fable at the very end of the poem, the speaker is enveloped by a darkness which seems to confirm the envisaged breakdown of imaginative correspondence between the “world” and the “Unattainable.”

Such a conclusion has, in fact, been a possibility fairly early in the poem in Tennyson's account of the shattering of a city by an earthquake (ll. 28-40). Christopher Ricks comments that these lines of “Timbuctoo” are “clearly a re-working (though without close verbal similarities) of passages which occur early in the Trinity MS. but not in 1931.”¹⁴ But the essential concern of “Timbuctoo” lines 28-40, a concern intimately related to the new theme of the new poem, is not anticipated in the passages in T.Nbk.18 referred to by Professor Ricks. Below are transcripts of these previously unpublished passages. In the first extract the first three lines and the last line of the passage correspond to lines 71-73 and 74 in section I of the 1931 text of “Armageddon”:

Nor did y(e) glittering of white wings escape
My notice far within y(e) East w(h) caught
Ruddy reflection from th' ensanguin'd West
(Where with wide interval y(e) long low moaning
Of inarticulate thunder like y(e) wail
Of some lost City in its evil day
Rose, mutter'd, deepen'd round y(e) verge of Heaven)
Nor ever & anon y(e) shrill clear sound

T.Nbk.18, f. 4^r

The lines of the second extract correspond to lines 96-101 in section I of the 1931 text of “Armageddon.” In the second line of the passage Tennyson has interlineated the word “like”:

                                                                                          In y(e) East
Broad rose y(e) Moon—first ∧ like ∧ y(e) rounded Dome
Of some huge Temple in whose twilight vault
Barbaric Priesthood meditate high things
To wondrous Idols on y(e) crusted wall
Then with dilated orb & mark'd with lines

T.Nbk.18, f. 5^r

There indeed seem to be no close verbal similarities between these passages and lines 28-40 of “Timbuctoo.” Nor do they give expression to the anxious thought that legends, myths, all poetic dreams, may be groundless fantasies containing no element of higher truth. In “Timbuctoo” we are told that men clung to the legend of Atlantis with a desperate hope as when, in a city shaken by earthquake,

At midnight, in the lone Acropolis,
Before the awful Genius of the place
Kneels the pale Priestess in deep faith, the while
Above her head the weak lamp dips and winks
Unto the fearful summoning without:
Nathless she ever clasps the marble knees,
Bathes the cold hand with tears, and gazeth on
Those eyes which wear no light but that wherewith
Her phantasy informs them.

(32-40)

The failure here to affirm the possibilities of “a soul / Imparted—to brute matter” (The Excursion, VIII. 203-04) contrasts sharply with the insistent, if shrill, idealism of Tennyson's Cambridge poems “To Poesy (O God, make this age great),” “The Poet,” and “The Poet's Mind.” In these works we see one aspect of Tennyson's response to the doctrine of Romantic genius advanced by F. D. Maurice and his associates among the Cambridge Apostles. This contrast directs us to Tennyson's lifelong preoccupation with the difficulty of achieving an apprehension of the integrity of the whole, a difficulty which may be considered in the light of what Robindra Kumar Biswas has termed “the disintegration [in the early-Victorian period] of the special object-subject synthesis achieved through Romantic … theories of imagination and poetic cognition.”¹⁵

The conclusion of “Timbuctoo” may be compared with the attitude Tennyson reveals towards his Romantic inheritance in a letter which he wrote in 1834, three years after leaving Trinity, to his Cambridge friend James Spedding. In the same year Sir Henry Taylor, in the Preface to his Philip Van Artevelde, had attacked the poetry of the younger Romantics, explaining that theirs was “a moving and enchanting art, acting upon the fancy, the affections, the passions, but scarcely connected with the exercise of the intellectual faculties.” In brief, they lacked “subject matter.”¹⁶ Shortly after the appearance of Taylor's work, Tennyson replied to a letter sent him by Spedding:

By a quaint coincidence I received your letter directed (I suppose) by Philip Van Artevelde with Philip himself (not the man but the book) and I wish to tell you that I think him a noble fellow. I close with him in most that he says of modern poetry though it may be that he does not take sufficiently into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley …

Tennyson's defence of these poets disparaged by Taylor becomes more complicated as he continues—

… the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley which however mistaken they may be did yet give the world another heart and new pulses—and so are we kept going. Blessed be those that grease the wheels of the old world, insomuch as to move on is better than to stand still.¹⁷

In these last lines Tennyson is re-wording Keats's account of the “mighty workings” of the great spirits—first among them, Wordsworth—of the Romantic Revival:

These, these will give the world another heart
          And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings?——
          Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb.

(Second Sonnet to Haydon, ll. 11-14)

Yet, although the closeness between Keats and Tennyson is important, the difference is equally, if not more, significant. Keats's unquestioning exultation is countered in Tennyson by the grimly attenuated images of weary prolongation. Apart from that doubleness of response which appears in his simultaneous endorsement and qualification of Taylor's attack, there is evident, in Tennyson's assertion of the need to work within the achievements of his poetic predecessors, a tone of frustration, a sense that the new heart and pulses recently given to the world may in fact signify nothing more than a deeply ambiguous vitality, and that a fully vital new world is still waiting to be born.

Notes

1. Quoted in An Eton Boy … the Letters of James Milnes Gaskell … 1820-1830, ed. C. M. Gaskell (London, 1939), pp. 164-65. The subject for the Chancellor's English Poem was announced in the Times for 13 December, 1828 (p. 3, col. 4); entries were to be submitted by 31 March, 1829. In Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son, 2 vols (London, 1897), I, 45 (hereafter cited as Memoir), Hallam Tennyson writes that “On June 6th, 1829, the announcement was made that my father had won the prize. …” The exact date at which Tennyson met Arthur Hallam remains uncertain. Tennyson went up to Cambridge in November 1827 (see E. F. Shannon, Jr., “Alfred Tennyson's Admission to Cambridge,” TLS [Times Literary Supplement], 6 March, 1959, p. 136) and Hallam entered Trinity in October 1828 (E. F. Shannon, Jr., Tennyson and the Reviewers, Harvard, 1952, p. 22). If the latest submission date for entries in the Prize Poem competition was 31 March 1829, then my argument in this essay that Hallam had some influence over the composition of Tennyson's poem must imply the existence of a fairly developed relationship—if not actually a friendship—between the two men before that date. Hallam's “Timbuctoo” was completed by 15 February 1829, as is made clear in a letter of that date which he wrote to his father (cf. The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb, Ohio State University Press, 1981, p. 274).

2. Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, p. 326.

3. “Tennyson: ‘Armageddon’ into ‘Timbuctoo,’” Modern Language Review, LXI (1966), p. 23. The MS. containing the draft of “Armageddon” printed by Sir Charles Tennyson is watermarked 1824. T.Nbk.18 is dated by Tennyson: “Jan 10 - 1828.” When Professor Ricks published his edition of The Poems of Tennyson, London, 1969 (the edition of Tennyson's poetry referred to throughout this essay) the Trinity MS. of “Armageddon” was still under interdiction and he was able to print only the 1931 text of the poem. The full text of the T.Nbk.18 version of “Armageddon” has never been published. In the present essay all quotations, except where otherwise noted, are taken from 1931 and all section and line numbers refer to that text. All lines from 1931 that are quoted in this essay have close counterparts in T.Nbk.18, except for 1931, III, 1-9, which do not appear in the Trinity draft.

4. Tennyson's comment, made in 1889, is reported in the MS. Journal of Andrew Hichens (now in the Tennyson Research Centre: MS. Materials, Vol. 10). Hallam Tennyson printed a version of Hichens's note in the Memoir, II, 355.

5. Cf. The writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (London and New York, 1943), pp. 37-44.

6. W. Wordsworth, “Essay Upon Epitaphs, III,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford, 1974), II, 82.

7. “Preface” to the Remains of Arthur Henry Hallam (privately-printed, London, 1834), pp. xxxii-xxxiii.

8. “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. N. Frye (New York and London, 1963), p. 16.

9. ibid., p. 17.

10. In a letter of 14 September 1829 to W. E. Gladstone Hallam said: “Let me quote … the words of my favourite poet” and went on to quote The Excursion, IV, 10-17 (Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, pp. 317-18).

11. Tennyson (New York, 1972), p. 19.

12. Modern Language Review, LXI (1966), p. 23.

13. In a letter to Henry Hallam (14 February 1834) Tennyson wrote that Arthur's “Timbuctoo” “is everyway so much better than that wild and unmethodised performance of my own. …”; The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ed. C. Y. Lang and E. F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford, 1982-), I, 109.

14. Modern Language Review, LXI (1966), p. 24.

15. Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration (Oxford, 1972), p. 203.

16. Philip Van Artevelde; A Dramatic Romance, 2 vols (London, 1834), I. xii.

17. Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, I, 120.