1. The Princess 1847

Abstract

Fitzgerald Thought The Princess “a wretched waste of power at a time of life when a man ought to be doing his best.” Carlyle was even less kind: “very gorgeous, fervid, luxuriant, but indo- lent, somnolent, almost imbecile.” Yet a poem which incorporates three of Tennyson’s finest lyrics— “Tears, idle tears,” “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white,” and “Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height”—is patently not negligible. The Princess has not been neglected by Tennysonians, by those who enter on the poem with keen convictions about Tennyson s work and character. But for all its skill and idiosyncracy, it is a profoundly unsatisfactory poem in that its intricate failure goes to much that is deepest in Tennyson. In January 1834, Arthur Hallam was buried at Clevedon in Somerset. Next month Henry Hallam wrote to Tennyson about the projected volume of Arthur’s Remains, a cautious selection from the prose and poetry to be privately printed and circulated. Would Tennyson like to communicate anything that might figure in the short memoir? “I should desire,” said Henry Hallam, “to have the character of his mind, his favourite studies and pursuits, his habits and views, delineated.” Tennyson urged the inclusion of Arthur’s religious exploration into evil, Theodicaea Noviss’tma, and this was reluctantly granted. (Henry Hallam later sup- pressed the piece.) But the poet who had already written some of the sections of In Memoriam was yet too painfully close. His re- ply to Henry Hallam has a poignant dignity and hope:

I attempted to draw up a memoir of his life and character, but I failed to do him justice. I failed even to please myself. I could scarcely have pleased you. I hope to be able at a future period to concentrate whatever powers I may possess on the construction of some tribute to those high speculative endowments and comprehensive sympathies which I ever loved to contemplate; but at present, though somewhat ashamed at my own weakness, 1 find the object yet is too near me to permit of any very accurate delineation. You, with your clear insight into human nature, may perhaps not wonder that in the dearest service I could have been employed in, I should be found most deficient.