When Did Tennyson Meet Hallam?Author(s): T. H. Vail MotterSource: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Mar., 1942), pp. 209-210Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2910411 .

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W EN DID TENNYSON MEET HALILAM? 209

WHEN DID TENNYSON MEET HALLAM?

In the absence of any statement in the Tennyson Memoir as to when Tennyson and Hallam met, biographers and commentators have taken the view stated by Churton Collins: " When he [Hallam] first met Tennyson is not recorded, but it was probably in his first term, the autumn of 1828." 1 I wish to suggest that the meeting has been recorded, by Tennyson himself, in Sections :KXii and XLVI

of In Memoriam; and in support of the In Memoriam date of April, 1829, I cite an unpublished letter from Hallam to W. E. Gladstone.

The relevant stanzas are, first, these from Section xxii: The path by which we twain did go,

Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,

From flower to flower, from snow to snow; And we with singing cheer'd the way,

And, crown'd with all the season lent, From April on to April went,

And glad at heart from May to May. But where the path we walk'd began

To slant the fifth autumnal slope, As we descended following Hope,

There sat the Shadow fear'd of man;

and, secondly, the verse in the third stanza of Section XLVI:

And those five years its richest field,

which takes up the sense of " the fifth autumnal slope " of the pre- ceding passage. Although commentators have deduced the year 1828 from these passages,2 they seem clearly to say, " Our friend- ship, beginning in April, 1829, proceeded smoothly for four years; but as the fifth autumn, i. e., the autumn of 1833, arrived, Death came on September 15, 1833. I therefore look back upon the five years, 1829-1833, as the richest of my life."

The In Memoriam date seems to me quite unassailable. To any who would suggest that the lines indicate May as plausibly as April, it can be said that several considerations favor April. First. it is April, traditionally celebrated by poets as the month of the begin- nings of things, that had always for Tennyson a special and

I John Churton Collins, In Memoriam, The Princess, and Maud, London, 1902, p. 4. Cf. also Alfred Lord Tennyson: a memoir, by his son, London, 1897, i, 33-5.

2 Especially, for its influelnce on others, the Eversley Edition of In Memoriam, ed. by Hallam, Lord Tennyson, London, 1909, p. 230.

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210 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, MARCH, 1942

poignant quality which the reader can investigate for himself. concordance in hand. Secondly, poems submitted for the University Prize were called in in April, and it is possible that the two authors of poems called " Timbuctoo " may have been thrown together in connection with this competition. Thirdly, the sonnet of Hallam's to Tennyson, beginning " Oh last in time, but worthy to be first," bore the date, when first printed in Hiallam's Poems of 1830, of May, 1829, and seems unlikely to have been composed without a bit more testing of a new friendship than would have been the case had the friendship begun in May.

The only other evidence bearing upon the meeting is a sentence written by Hallam to Gladstone from Trinity, February 22, 1829: 3 "I live here, principally in what may be termed the 'metaphysical set,' many of whom are men of great talents, but in none of whom, if I except Frere, one of the best creatures that ever breathed, have I found a true friend." In this statement we find irrefutable evi- dence that Hallam and Tennyson were not friends before February 22, 1829, and we must accept the statement in spite of the theore- tical unlikelihood that both men could be known to Richard Monck- ton Milnes, one of the " metaphysical set," and not known to each other, or that other unlikelihood, that although both students had William Whewell for tutor, they passed six months at Trinity without becoming friends. But we recall that Edward Fitzgerald was at Trinity and did not know his fellow-collegian, Tennyson.

Only one piece of evidence could be plausibly adduced against the In Memoriam date of April, 1829. There exists in the so-called Allen Manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, an unpublished sonnet composed by Tennyson and amended by Hallam. It is written out in Hallam's hand, with the note: " N. B. I had some hand in the worst part of this somnet. A. H. HI.," and it is dated, in Hallam's hand, 1828. In the light of the other evidence just presented, it seems obvious that Hallam was there noting the date of Tennyson's original composition, since that part of the Allen Mfanuscript consists of poems by Tennyson copied out by Hallam.4

s The letter is among the Gladstone Papers at the British Museum, to which I had access through the kindness of their curator, Mr. A. T. Bassett.

4 This sonnet, in another hand, is also part of the so-called Heath Manu- script at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, where the date, 1832, is crossed out. The sonnet will appear in my forthcominig edition of Hallam's writings.

T. H. VAIL MOTTEIR Wellesley College

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