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TENNYSON
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON
A MEMOIR
By his son
I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within Himself make pure !
VOLUME I
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO.. LTD.
1897
All righit rtMtrvtd
Copyright, 1897,
By the macmillan company.
/^/
KOTI0O0) Pmi
1. 1. OnhiBff ft Ob. - Bvwlck ft Bmilh Norwood M«M. U.S.A.
■• 'I'fr-' ■■'■"".■/
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• ••^LHN
7:? the (>.4r.'^" j^ti,
' . - •> ■)RED
. ■■ -. .7 -
' .: '• ■' IS liOKNt..
t-f KV MOKN.
' ' ^ TH^K AS nf r
THESE VOLUMES ARE DEDICATED
BY PERMISSION
TO THE QUEEN
An Unpublished Version of ''To Ae Queeni' 1851.
THE NOBLEST MEN METHINKS ARE BRED OF OURS THE SAXO-NORMAN RACE; AND IN THE WORLD THE NOBLEST PLACE,
MADAM, IS YOURS, OUR QUEEN AND HEAD.
YOUR NAME IS BLOWN ON EVERY WIND,
YOUR FLAG THRO' AUSTRAL ICE IS BORNE, AND GLIMMERS TO THE NORTHERN MORN,
AND FLOATS IN EITHER GOLDEN IND.
I GIVE THIS FAULTY BOOK TO YOU,
FOR, THO' THE FAULTS BE THICK AS DUST IN VACANT CHAMBERS, I CAN TRUST
YOUR WOMAN'S NATURE KIND AND TRUE.
%' JO - vo
CONTENTS.
CKAPTXR PAGE
PtUCtACB Xi
Chronoux^y of the Books of Poems . • • xviM
I. Boyhood, 1809-1827 i
II. GiMBRiDGBy 1828-1830 33
III. GlMBRIDGEy SOBIERSBY AND AltTHUlt HaLLAM, 1830-31 . 66
IV. Arthur Hallam, 1831-1833 79
V. The 1833 Volume. Solitude and Work, 1833-1835 . 116
VI. Visits to the Lakes and elsewhere. The ''Mortb
d'Arthur." 1836-37 147
VII. Extracts from Letters to Emily Sellwood, 1838-
1840 167
VIII. London Lifs and the 1843 Volumes • • .183
IX. ReMINISCKNCES of TkNNYSON (about 1842) . .301
X. LsiTERSy 1843-1845 213
XI. Switzerland 1846, and Letters 1846-47 • • . 330
XII. "The Princess'' 247
XIII. Cheltenham, London, Cornwall, Scotland and Ire-
land, 1 846-1 850 363
XIV. "InMemoriam" 295
XV. Marriage, 1850-51 338
XVI. Cheltenham and Whitby, 1853 347
XVIL Twickenham, 1853-53 355
• ••
Vlll CONTENTS.
CRAPm PAGE
XVIII. FARRINGFORDy 1853-1855 368
XIX. "Maud" 393
XX. Home Life and "Idylls of the King," 1856-1859 . 413
XXI. Tour in Cornwall and the Solly Isles, i860 . . 458
XXU. Farringford Friends. The Pyrenees. Death of
THE Prince Consort. 1860-1862 .... 467
XXIII. Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Letters, i 862-1 864 . 487
Appendix 497
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Alfred Tennyson, from the Portrait painted by Samuel Lau- rence Frontispiece
Alfred Tennyson, from a Sketch by J. Spedding, made at Mire- house, April, 1835 146
Alfred Tennyson, from a Sketch by Edward Fitzgerald, made at
Mirehouse, 1835 153
Alfred Tennyson. Engraved by G. J. Stodart from a Daguerreo- type, 1838 166
''Tears, idle Tears," from the original MS. .... 246
''Break, break, breah^" from an original MS 295
Mrs Tennyson, from the Portrait at Aldworth, painted by G. F.
Watts, R.A 330
View from Drawing-Room at Farringford, from a Painting by
Richard Doyle 365
Hallam and Lionel Tennyson, from the Picture at Aldworth
painted by G. F. Watts, R.A 370
" Let not the solid ground," from the original MS. . . . 392
Farringford, from a Water-colour Drawing by Mrs AUingham . 412
Alfred Tennyson, from the Portrait in the possession of Lady
Henry Somerset, painted by G. F. Watts, R.A., in 1859 . 428
Alfred Tennyson, engraved by G. J. Stodart from a Photograph
by O. G. Rejlander, 1859 458
T.I
PREFACE.
Unpublished Sonnet
{Written orig^nalfy as a preface to "Becket**).
Old ghosts whose day was done ere mine began. If earth be seen from your conjectured heaven. Ye know that History is half-dream — ay even The man's life in the letters of the man. There lies the letter, but it is not he As he retires into himself and is : Sender and sent-to go to make up this, Their offspring of this union. And on me Frown not, old ghosts, if I be one of those Who make yati utter things you did not say. And mould you aU awry and mar your worth; For whatsoever knows us truly, knows That none can truly write his single day. And none can write it for him upon earth.
" History is half-dream — ay even The man's life in the letters of the man";
but besides the letters of my father and of his friends there are his poems, and in these we must look for the innermost sanctuary of his being. For my own part, I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works ; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written ; and it is difficult for me so
xi S2
Xll PREFACE.
far to detach m3rseK from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. There is also the impossibility of fathoming a great man's mind ; his deeper thoughts are hardly ever revealed. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography, for
" None can truly write his single day, And none can write it for him upon earth."
However he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment, but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies.
For those who cared to know about his literary
history he wrote " Merlin and the Gleam." From his
boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlin — that spirit of
poetry — which bade him know his power and follow
throughout his work a pure and high ideal, with a
simple and single devotedness and a desire to ennoble
the life of the world, and which helped him through
doubts and difficulties to " endure as seeing Him who is
invisible."
Great the Master,
And sweet the Magic,
When over the valley,
In early summers,
Over the mountain,
On human faces.
And all around me,
Moving to melody.
Floated the Gleam.
In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of the ** ridged wolds " that rose above
PREFACE. XIU
his home, of the mountain-glen and snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies, with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the " croak of the raven," the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic —
The light retreated. The landskip darken'd. The melody deaden'd. The Master whisper'd " Follow the Gleam."
Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow his ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the harmonies of nature, "the warble of water," and " cataract music of falling torrents," the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Eclogues and English Idylls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through.
Innocent maidens, Garrulous children. Homestead and harvest. Reaper and gleaner. And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labour.
By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of humanity from his own ex- perience, he rose to a melody " stronger and statelier." He celebrated the glory of " human love and of human heroism " and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his Epic of king Arthur, "typifying above all things the life of man," wherein he had intended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He had purposed that this was to be the chief work
XIY PRSFACE.
ol his maehood Yet the death ot his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose ; nor any loiter for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor in the Gleam that had *" waned to a wintry glimmer."
Qouds and darkness Qosed upon Camelot; Arthur had vanished I knew not whither, The king who loved me, And cannot die.
Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur
of the Idylls and the Arthur " the man he held as half
divine." He himself had fought with death, and had
come out victorious to find " a stronger faith his own,"
and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for
universal humankind, that never forsook him through the
future years.
And broader and brighter
The Gleam flying onward,
Wed to the melody,
Sang thro' the world.
# # # # •
I saw, whenever
In passing it glanced upon
Hamlet or city.
That under the Crosses
The dead man's garden,
The mortal hillock.
Would break into blossom;
And so to the land's
Last limit I came.
o 3
C/3
I
i.
'I
PREFACE. XV
Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the m3nstery of the Infinite.
I can no longer,
But die rejoicing,
For thro' the Magic
Of Him the Mighty,
Who taught me in childhood,
There on the border
Of boundless Ocean,
And all but in Heaven
Hovers the Gleam.
That is the reading of the poet's riddle as he gave it to me. He thought that "Merlin and the Gleam" would probably be enough of biography for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this has not been -their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I might do, and have endeavoured to give briefly something of what people naturally wish to know, something about his birth, homes, school, college, friend- ships, travels, and the leading events of his life, enough to present the sort of insight into his history and pursuits which one wants, if one desires to make a companion of a man. The picture of his early days has been mainly sketched from what he and my mother have told me. My difficulty in arranging the later chapters has been how to choose, and how to throw aside, from the mass of material \ I have quoted from many manuscripts never
^My thanks are due to Professor Henry Sidgwick and Professor Palgrave, who have helped me to make my selection from upwards of 40,000 letters.
XVI PREFACE,
meant for the public eye, many of which I have burnt according to his instructions. Among those that I have collected here, the most interesting to me are my father's unpublished poems, letters, — and notes on his own life and work left me for publication after his death, Arthur Hallam's letters, Edward Fitzgerald's private MS notes ^ (some of which he gave me, and some of which have been lent to me by Mr Aldis Wright), and the journal of our home life. This last is a simple record of daily something-nothings.
If there appear, in the Reminiscences kindly con- tributed by his different friends, to be any discrepancies, let it be remembered that the many-sided man has sympathy with many and various minds, and that the poet may be like the magnetic needle, which, though it can be moved from without, yet in itself remains true to the magnetic pole.
According to my father's wish, throughout the memoir my hand will be as seldom seen as may be, and this accounts for the occasionally fragmentary character of my work. The anecdotes and sayings here related have been mostly taken down as soon as spoken, and are hence, I trust, not marred or mended by memory, which, judging from some anecdotes of him recently published, is wont to be a register not wholly accurate. " Fingunt simul creduntque."
Such reviews as I have quoted are chiefly those which have met with my father's approbation as ex- planatory commentaries. For my own part, I have generally refrained from attempting to pronounce judg- ment either on his poems or on his personal qualities and characteristics; although more than any living man I
^ Generally signed E. F. G. throughout this work.
PREFACE, XVll
have had reason to appreciate his splendid truth and trustfulness, his varied creative imagination, and love of beauty, his rich humour, his strength of purpose, the largeness of his nature, and the wide range of his genius. If I may venture to speak of his special influence over the world, my conviction is, that its main and enduring factors are his power of expression, the perfection of his workmanship, his strong common sense, the high purport of his life and work, his humility, and his open-hearted and helpful sympathy —
^^Fortezza^ ed umilitade^ e largo core^^
CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOKS OF POEMS.
1827. — Poems by Two Brothers. London : Printed for W. Simp- kin and R. Marshall, Stationers'-Hall-Court ; and J. and J. Jackson. Louth : 1827. Published in two sizes.
1829. — ^TiMBUcroo. A Poem which obtained the Chancellor's Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, 1829. By A. Tennyson, of Trinity College. 8vo.
1830. — Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson. London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830. i2mo.
1832. — Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. London : Edward Moxon, 64 New Bond Street (dated 1833). i^mo.
1833. — ^The Lover's Tale, privately printed in London.
1842. — Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. London : Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1842. 2 vols., i2mo.
1^43* — T^^ Same. Second edition. London: 1843. 2 vols., i2mo.
1845. — '^^^ Same. Third edition. London: 1845. 2 vols., i2mo.
1846. — The Same. Fourth edition. London: 1846. 2 vols., i2mo.
1847. — ^The Princess. A Medley. By Alfred Tennyson. London : Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1847. i^mo.
1848. — ^The Same. Second edition. London : 1848 (with addition of dedication to Henry Lushington).
1848. — Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. Fifth edition. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1848. i2mo.
1850. — In Memoriam. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1850. i2mo. (Appointed Poet-laureate Nov. 19.)
xnii
CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOKS OF POEMS. XIX
1850. — ^The Princess. Third edition (altered, with songs added). London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1850. 12 mo.
1850. — Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. Sixth edition. London:
1850. lamo. {.After reading a Life and Letters included.)
1851. — Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. Seventh edition. London:
185 1. lamo. ( Come not when I am dead^ Edwin Morris^ 77ie Eagle, and the dedication To the Queen included.)
185 1. — ^The Princess. Fourth edition. London: 1851. lamo. 7^ edition first has the passages describing the Princess
weird seizures,
1 85 1. — In Memoriam. Fourth edition. London: 1851. lamo. (O Sorrow , wilt thou live with me f added.)
1852. — Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. By Alfred Tennyson, Poet-laureate. London : Edward Moxon, Dover S&eet, 1852. 8vo.
1853. — PoEBfS, BY Alfred Tennyson. Eighth edition. London: 1853. i2mo. (With an alteration in the Dream of Fair Women, and lines To E, Z. added.)
1853. — ^The Princess. Fifth edition (the final text). London: 1853. i2mo.
1854. — Charge of the Light Brigade, published in the Examiner, Dec. 9th, 1854, then printed for the soldiers before Sebastopol, August, 1855.
1855. — Maud, and Other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-laureate. London: Edward Moxon, 1855. i2mo.
1857. — Poems by Alfred Tennyson. Illustrations by D. G. Rossetti, J. E. Millais, and others. Edward Moxon. Royal 8vo.
1859. — Idylls of the King. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-laureate. London: Edward Moxon & Co., Dover Street, 1859. lamo.
t86i. — ^Thb sailor Boy. London: Emily Faithfull & Co., Victoria Press.
1863. — Idylls of the King. A new edition. London: 1862. i2mo. (with Dedication to the Prince Consort).
1862. — Ode: May the First, 1862, for the opening of the International ExHiBmoN. London: Edward Moxon & Co. (published also in Eraser, June, 1862).
1863^ — ^Wkloobie to Alexandra. 4 pages. London: Edward Moxon & Co.
XX CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOKS OF POEMS.
1864. — Enoch Arden, etc. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet- laureate. London : Edward Moxon & Co., Dover Street, 1864. lamo.
1865. — Selections from the works of Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L,, Poet-laureate. London: Edward Moxon &, Co., Dover Street, 1865. i6mo.
ITus was published in MoxorCs Miniature PoetSy and contains six new poems, viz. : * The Captain^ *0n a Mourner,' *Home They Brought Him Slain with Spears,' and three * Sonnets to a Coquette'
^The Vicmf. ) Printed by Sir Ivor Guest (Lord Wimbome), ' ' The Window. ) set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan.
1869. — ^The Holy Grail, and Other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-laureate. London: Strahan & Co., Pub- lishers, 56 Ludgate Hill, 1869. iimo.
1870. — ^The Window, or the Song of the Wrens. With music by Arthur Sullivan. London: Strahan, 187 1 (Dec. 1870).
18 71. — ^Minuture EDmoN of Complete Works. London: Strahan & Co.
1 871. — ^The Last Tournament. Contemporary Review, December.
1872. — Gareth and Lvnetfe, etc. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-laureate. London: Strahan & Co., 56 Ludgate Hill, 1872. t2mo.
1872. — ^Thk Library EDmoN of the Complete Works. In seven volumes. London: Strahan & Co., 1872. Large 8vo. (The IdyUs of the King in sequence with Epilogue to the Queen.)
1874. — A Welcome to the Duchess of Edinburgh. H. S. King & Co.
1874. — ^The Cabinet EDmoN (H. S. King & Co.) contained: In 0u Garden at Swainston, The Voice and the Peak, England and America.
1875. — Queen Mary. A Drama, by Alfred Tennyson. London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875. i2mo.
1876. — Queen Mary, produced at the Lyceum Theatre.
1876. — Harold. A Drama, by Alfred Tennyson. London: Henry S. Kling & Co. (dated 1877). i2mo.
1879. — ^The Lover's Tale. By Alfred Tenn)rson. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., i Paternoster Square, 1879. i2mo.
1879. — ^The Falcon, produced at the St. James' Theatre.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOKS OF POEMS. XXI
1880. — Collected Sonnets, By Charles Tennyson Turner with memorial lines by Alfred Tennyson. Edited (with a short preface) by Hallam Tennyson. London : C. Kegan Paul. lamo.
1880. — ^Ballads and Other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. London : C. Kegan Paul & Co., i Paternoster Square, 1880. lamo.
1 88 1. — ^The Cup, produced at the Lyceum Theatre.
1 88a. — ^The Promise of May, produced at the Globe Theatre.
1884. — ^The Cup and the Falcon. By Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet-laureate. London : Macmillan & Co., 1884. zamo.
1884. — ^ NEW Single- Volume Edihon of Works. Revised by the Author with corrections. Macmillan & Co.
1884. — ^Becket. By Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet-laureate. London : Macmillan & Co., 1884. Crown 8vo.
1885. — ^TiRESiAS, AND Other Poems (including Ofue more the Heavenly Pawer^ published in The Youth*s Companion, Boston, U.S.A., 1884). By Alfred Lord Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-laureate. London: Macmillan & Co., 1885. i2mo.
1 886. — ^A NEW Library EomoN of Complete Works. In ten volumes (revised, with additions by the author). London: Macmillan & Ca (Also a new single-volume Edition, with slight alterations. Macmillan & Co.)
1886. — LocKSLEY Hall Sixty Years After, etc. By Alfred Lord Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-laureate. London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1886. i2mo.
1887. — Carmen Saeculare. An ode in honour of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. Macmillan^ s Magazine, April.
1889. — Demeter and Other Poems. Macmillan & Co., London and New York. i2mo. (20,000 copies sold in first week.)
1889. — A NEW AND revisfj) Single-Volume EDmoN OF Works (with many additions). Macmillan & Co.
1892. — ^The Foresters, Robin Hood and Maid Marun. London and New York : Macmillan & Co. i2mo. Produced at Daly's Theatre in New York, March 17.
1892. — ^The Silent Voices. Order of Service in Westminster Abbey, Oct 12th. Printed for copyright purposes. London and New York : Macmillan & Co.
1893. — Oct. 28th. The Death of CEnone, Akbar's Dream and Other Poems. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. i2mo. Abo large paper Edition with five steel portraits.
XXU CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOKS OF POEMS.
1893. — ^Becket, as arranged for the stage by Henry Irtbig (revised by Alfred Lord Tennyson). Macmillan & Co.
1894. — ^The cobiplxte Single-Volume Editiqn op the Works, with last alterations^ etc. London : Macmillan & Co.
InRowe's Coming of ArthuryZnA Passing of Arthur; G.C.Macanlay's Gare^ and Lynette, and Marriage of Geraint, and Geraintand Enid; Ainger's Tennyson for the Young; Rowe's Aylmer^s Field; Rowe's Selections from Tennyson; Palgrave's Golden Treasury Selection of Lyrical Poems ; DaLwson^s Princess ; Ko\(e*s Enoch Arden, and Selections^ whenever there was any doubtful point in the notes, I referred it to my father: so that in the later editions of these annotated volumes the commentaries may be considered tolerably accurate.
Poems published in the " Nineteenth Century."
My fother contributed the following poems to the Nineteenth Century: in 1877, "Prefetory Sonnet" (March), and "Montenegro" (May), and " To Victor Hugo " (June), and " Achilles over the Trench " (August) ; and in March, 1878, he contributed "The Revenge"; in April, 1879, " The Defence of Lucknow, with a Dedicatory Poem to Princess Alice " ; in May, 1880, "De Profundis"; in November, 1881, "Despair"; in September, 1882, "To Virgil"; in March, 1883, "Prater ave atque vale " ; in February, 189a, " On the death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale."
CHAPTER I.
BOYHOOD.
1 809-1 8 2 7,
The Tennysons may probably in their origin have been Danes, and they appear to have first settled north of the H umber, in Holderness. The earliest notice of the family that can be found is that in 1 343 one John Tenison charged certain persons with forcibly taking away his goods and chattels at Paulfleet to the amount of £40. In 1528 John Tennyson of Ryall directs that his body should be buried in the kirk-garthe of All Hallows at Skekelinge. To Margaret his wife he de- vises one ox-yard of land and half a close called Stockett Croft during her widowhood. Bequests are also made to his several children. One of them named William, who was possibly a Mayor, afterwards leaves to John, his son, his "best mace, and to Paul Church, twenty pence." He desires to be buried in the same kirk-garthe of All Hallows. From these Tennysons, through a Lancelot Tennyson of Preston, and Ralph Tennyson, who raised a troop of horse to support William HI., descends Michael of Lincoln, my father's great-grand- father. Michael was remembered by my grandfather, the Rev. Dr George Clayton Tennyson, as taking him into his bed and talking to him about the stars.
Half-way between Homcastle and Spilsby, in a land T. I. 1 I
2 BOYHOOD. [l809-
of quiet villages, large fields, gray hillsides and noble tall-towered churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold, the pastoral hamlet of Somersby nestles, embosomed in trees.
Here, on the 6th of August, 1809, was bom, in his father's rectory, Alfred Tennyson. He was the fourth of twelve children, eight sons and four daughters, most of them more or less true poets, and of whom all except two have lived to 70 and upward. Dr Tennyson bap- tized the boy two days after he was born, following the Prayer-book instruction that people " defer not the Bap- tism of their children longer than the first or second Sunday next after their birth."
" Here's a leg for a babe of a week ! " says doctor ; and he would be bound. There was not his like that year in twenty parishes round \
was said of him ; nevertheless during his infancy three times after convulsions he was thought to be dead.
In 1892 I visited the old home, and when I returned, told my father that the trees had grown up obscur- ing the view from the Rectory, and that the house itself looked very desolate. All he answered was, " Poor little place ! " He always spoke of it with an affectionate remembrance; of the woodbine that climbed into the bay window of his nursery; of the Gothic vaulted dining- room with stained glass windows, making, as my uncle Charles Turner used to say, "butterfly souls" on the walls; of the beautiful stone chimney-piece carved by his father; of the pleasant little drawing-room lined with book-shelves, and furnished with yellow curtains, sofas and chairs, and looking out on the lawn. This lawn was overshadowed on one side by wych- elms, and on the other by larch and sycamore trees.
* Sec " The Grandmother."
1827] SOMERSBY. 3
Here, my father said, he made his early song " A spirit haunts the year s last hours." Beyond the path, bound- ing the green sward to the south, ran in the old days a deep border of lilies and roses, backed by hollyhocks and sunflowers. Beyond that was
A garden bower'd close
With plaited alleys of the trailing rose,
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,
Or opening upon level plots
Of crowned lilies, standing near
Purple-spiked lavender —
sloping in a gradual descent to the parson's field, at the foot of which flows, by " lawn and lea," the swift, steep- banked brook, where are " brambley wildernesses," and " sweet forget-me-nots," and in which the " long mosses sway.'* The charm and beauty of this brook.
That loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, And swerves to left and right thro' meadowy curves That feed the mothers of the flock \
haunted him through life.
Near Somersby the stream joins another from Holy- well, and their confluence may be referred to in the lines :
By that old bridge, which, half in ruins then. Still makes a hoary eyebrow for the gleam Beyond it, where the waters marry.
" Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea " was the poem more especially dedicated to the Somersby stream, and not, as some have supposed, "The Brook," which is designed to be a brook of the imagination.
The orchard on the right of the lawn forms a sunny
^ ^ Ode to Memory,^ which he considered one of the best among his very early and peculiarly concentrated Nature-poems.
I — 2
4 BOYHOOD. [18O&-
little spot that awoke in his mind pleasant memories. " How often," he said, " have I risen in the eariy dawn to see the golden globes lying in the dewy grass among those apple trees." He delighted too to recall the rare richness of the bowery lanes : the ancient Norman cross standing in the churchyard, close to the door of the quaint little church: the wooded hollow of Holywell: the cold springs flowing from under the sandstone rocks : the flowers, the mosses, and the ferns. When there I looked in vain for the words " Byron is dead," which he had carved on a rock when he was fourteen, on hearing of Byron's death (April 19th, 1824), "a day when the whole world seemed to be darkened for me."
Like other children, the Tennysons had their imagi- native games; they were knights and jousted in mock tournaments, or they were "champions and warriors, defending a field, or a stone-heap, or again they would set up opposing camps with a king in the midst of each. The king was a willow-wand stuck into the ground, with an outer circle of immortals, to defend him, of firmer, stifiFer sticks. Then each party would come with stones, hurling at each other's king and trying to overthrow him^" Stories are told too about their boyish pranks in the old red-bricked house with em- battled parapet (Baumber's Farm), said to have been built by Vanbrugh, which adjoins the Rectory garden, and is erroneously called by some " The Moated Grange." " At all events, whatever may have happened," my father writes, " The Moated Grange is an imaginary house in the fen ; I never so much as dreamed of Baumber's farm * as the abode of Mariana, and the character of Baumber was so ludicrously unlike the Northern Farmer, that
1 Taken from the account which my father gave Mrs Thackeray Ritchie.
*The localities of my father^s subject-poems are wholly imaginary, although he has done for general Mid-Lincolnshire scenery what Virgil did for Mantua.
1827] EARLY DAYS AT HOME. 5
it really makes me wonder how any one can have the face to invent such stories." I think that their child- hood, despite the home circumstances which will be presently noticed, could not have been in the main un- happy. Their imaginative natures gave them many sources of amusement. One of these lasted a long time: the writing of tales in letter form, to be put under the vegetable dishes at dinner, and read aloud when it was over. I have heard from my uncles and aunts that my father's tales were very various in theme, some of them humorous and some savagely dramatic ; and that they looked to him as their most thrilling story-teller. Among historical events the doings of Wellington and Napoleon were the themes of story and verse. Yet Somersby was so far out of the world that the elder children say they did not hear of the battle of Waterloo at the time. They had however an early memory that " the coach drove through Somersby, the horses decorated with flowers and ribbons, and this might have been in honour of Wellington's great victory."
My aunt Cecilia (Mrs Lushington) narrates how in the winter evenings by the firelight little Alfred would take her on his knee, with Arthur and Matilda leaning against him on either side, the baby Horatio between his legs ; and how he would fascinate this group of young hero-worshippers, who listened open-eared and open- mouthed to legends of knights and heroes among untravelled forests rescuing distressed damsels, or on gigantic mountains fighting with dragons, or to his tales about Indians, or demons, or witches. The brothers and sisters would sometimes act one of the old English plays; and the elder members of the family thought that my father, from his dramatic rendering of his parts and his musical voice, would turn out an actor.
When he was seven years old he was asked, " Will
6 BOYHOOD. [1809-
you go to sea or to school?" He said, "To school," thinking that school was a kind of paradise; so he was taken to the house of his grandmother at Louth. His mother had been born in that town, being daughter of the vicar, the Rev. Stephen Fytche^; and he was sent to the Grammar School there, then under the Rev. J. Waite, a tempestuous, flogging master of the old stamp. He remembered to his dying day sitting on the stone steps of the school on a cold winter's morning, and crying bitterly after a big lad had brutally cuffed him on the head because he was a new boy. I still have the books which he used there, his Ovid, Delectus, Analecta Greeca Minora, and the old Eton Latin Grammar, originally put together by Erasmus, Lilly and Colet.
Among the incidents in his school life he would recall that of walking in a procession of boys, decked with ribbons, at the proclamation of the Coronation of George IV., and how the old women said that " The boys made the prettiest part of the show." Later in school life, he one day stood on a wall and made a political speech to his school-fellows, but was promptly ordered down by an usher, who asked him whether he wished to be the parish beadle.
Two facts that his grandmother told him at this time impressed him. One was that she had become blind from cataract, and then had a dream that she saw ; and, that, although couching for cataract was not common in those days, owing to this dream she had gone to
* George Clayton Tennyson of Tealby, clerk, and Elizabeth Fytche of Louth, spinster, were married in Louth Church by license on the 6th August 1805 by Wolley Jolland, Vicar, in the presence of John Fytche and Charles Tennyson. The Fytches were a county family of old descent. The first name on the Fytche pedigree is John Fitch of Fitch Castle in the North, who died in the 25th year of Edward L His descendant Thomas Fitch was knighted by Charles IL 1679, served the office of High Sheriff in Kent, and was created baronet, Sept. 7th, 1688.
1827] LOUTH SCHOOL. 7
London, and had been operated on successfully. The second was that she remembered having seen a young widow \ dressed in white, on her way to be strangled (her body afterwards to be burnt) for poisoning her husband.
A few years ago the present master of Louth School gave a holiday in my father's honour. The compliment gratified him ; yet he said, " How I did hate that school I The only good I ever got from it was the memory of the words, * sonus desilientis aquae,' and of an old wall covered with wild weeds opposite the school windows. I wrote an English poem there, for one of the Jacksons ; the only line I recollect is * While bleeding heroes lie along the shore V "
In 1820 he left Louth and came home to work under his father.
When twelve years old he wrote the following liter- ary epistle (the earliest of those now remaining) to his aunt Marianne Fytche.
SOMERSBY.
My dear Aunt Marianne,
When I was at Louth you used to tell me that you should be obliged to me if I would write to you and give you my remarks on works and authors. I shall now fulfil the promise which I made at that time. Going into the library this morning, I picked up " Sampson Agonistes," on which (as I think it is a play you like)
1 "Women who were found guilty of murdering their husbands, or of the other offences comprised under the terms high or petit treason, were publicly burnt, by a law which was not abolished till 1790. A stake ten or eleven feet high was planted in the ground. An iron ring was fastened near the top, and from it the culprit was hung while the faggots were kindled under her feet. The law enjoined that she should be burnt alive, but in practice the sentence was usually mitigated, and she was strangled before the fire touched her body.**
Lecky*8 England in the Eighteenth Century^ Vol. i. p. 506.
' See Professor J. W. Hales* account of Louth School in the GentkmarCs i9Uj Dec. 1892. See Appendix, p. 497.
8 BOYHOOD. [I8OO-
I shall send you my remarks. The first scene is the
lamentation of Sampson, which possesses much pathos
and sublimity. This passage,
Restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm Of hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone, But rush upon me thronging, and present Times past, what once I was, and what am now,
puts me in mind of that in Dante, which Lord Byron
has prefixed to his " Corsair," " Nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice, Nella miseria." His
complaint of his blindness is particularly beautiful,
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies! O worse than chains,
Dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct.
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased,
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me:
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong.
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first created beam, and thou great Word,
" Let there be light I '* and light was over all. —
I think this is beautiful, particularly
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.
After a long lamentation of Sampson, the Chorus enters, saying these words :
This, this is he. Softly awhile;
Let us not break in upon him :
O change beyond report, thought, or belief!
See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused.
If you look into Bp. Newton's notes, you will find that he informs you that " This beautiful application of the
1887] EARLY LETTERS. 9
word * diffused ' is borrowed from the Latin." It has the
same meaning as " temere " in one of the Odes of Horace,
Book the second,
Sic temere, et ros4 Canos odorati capillos,
of which this is a free translation, " Why lie we not at random, under the shade of the plantain (sub platano), having our hoary head perfumed with rose water ? " To an English reader the metre of the Chorus may seem unusual, but the difficulty will vanish, when I inform him that it is taken from the Greek. In line 133 there is this expression, " Chalybean tempered steel." The Chalybes were a nation among the ancients very famous for the making of steel, hence the expression " Chalybean," or peculiar to the Chalybes: in line 147 "the Gates of Azzar"; this probably, as Bp. Newton observes, was to avoid too great an alliteration, which the "Gates of Gaza" would have caused, though (in my opinion) it would have rendered it more beautiful : and (though I do not affirm it as a fact) perhaps Milton gave it that name for the sake of novelty, as all the world knows he was a great pedant. I have not, at present, time to write any more: perhaps I may con- tinue my remarks in another letter to you : but (as I am very volatile and fickle) you must not depend upon me, for I think you do not know any one who is so fickle as
Your affectionate nephew,
A. Tennyson.
P.S. Frederick informed me that grandmamma was quite growing dissipated, going out to parties every night. The Russels and grandmamma are to be at Dalby on Tuesday the 23rd, and I also hope to be taken by papa and mamma who are invited. Frederick made mamma promise to write him an account of the visit, but if I go, I shall take the trouble from mamma.
lO BOYHOOD. [1800-
His second earliest letter is a piece of nonsense with
which he favoured his sisters' governess.
La Mancha. My dear Dulcinea,
Pursuant to your request and the honour of Knight-errantry, and in conformity to my bump of con- scientiousness (which has grown so enormous since my visit to you that I can scarce put on my helmet), I now intend, as far as lies in my power, to fulfil that promise which the lustre of your charms extorted from me. Know then, most adorable mistress of my heart, that the manu- scripts which your angelic goodness and perfection were pleased to commend are not with me. If however my memory, assisted by the peerless radiance of your divine favour, avail me aught, I will endeavour to illume the darkness of my imagination with the recollection of your glorious excellence, till I produce a species of artificial memory unequalled by the Memoria Tec/mica of Mr Gray. Who would not remember when thus requested ? It would cause a dead idiot to start afresh to life and intellect. Accept then< soul of my soul, these effusions, in which no Ossianic, Miltonic, Byronic, Milmanic, Moorish, Grabble, Goleridgic etc. fire is contained. The first is a review of death :
Why should we weep for those who die ? etc.
The second is a comparison :
Je fais naitre la lurai^re
Du sein de robscurit^. (Rousseau.)
How gaily sinks the gorgeous sun, etc. And now farewell, my incomparable Dulcinea. In the truest spirit of knight-errantry.
Yours ever, Don Quixote.
As to his earliest attempts at poetry, he wrote the following note for me in 1890 :
1827] FIRST ATTEMPTS AT POETRY. II
"According to the best of my recollection, when I was about eight years old, I covered two sides of a slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of flowers for my brother Charles, who was a year older than I was, Thomson then being the only poet I knew. Before I could read, I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind, and crying out * I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind,' and the words * far, far away' had always a strange charm for me. About ten or eleven Pope's Homer s Iliad became a favourite of mine and I wrote hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre, nay even could improvise them, so could my two elder brothers, for my father was a poet and could write regular metre very skilfully."
[I give one example :
Can I forget thee? In the festive hall, Where wit and beauty reign and minstrelsy, My heart still fondly shall recur to thee, Thine image still recall.
Can I forget thee? In the gloomy hour, When wave on wave tempestuous passions roll, Thou, loved ideal, still shalt soothe my soul, And health and peace restore.
Farewell, my choicest blessings round thee wait,
And kindred angels guard thine angel form,
Guide and protect thee in life's rudest storm.
And every blast of fate ^ ! ]
^ These lines are copied from my grandfather^s scrapbook, a book which with others in his library he bound in leather with his own hands. His sister Mrs Matthew Russell also dabbled in poetry, and Dr Tennyson writes to her about some of her compositions in 1825 : << You do wrong to confess you are long in making verses, for no one would conceive it from the peculiar ease of the metre. You are not however singular: Gray hammerM at his verses with great difficulty, and yet they have immortalized his name. iCschylus, the great Greek tragedian, with great difficulty once composed three verses in three days : a poetaster came to i^chylus, and boasted that he had composed three thousand in the same time. * Your three thousanfi verses,' said iCschylus, * will last only for three days, whereas my three verses will last for ever.* Your soliloquy is very beautiful, and so beautiful that I have transcribed it amongst my choice selections.^
1 2 BOYHOOD. [I8O©.
The note continues — " My father once said to me, • Don't write so rhythmically, break your lines occasion- ally for the sake of variety.'
* Artist first, then Poet,' some writer said of me. I should answer, • Poeta nascitur non fit'; indeed, 'Poeta nascitur et fit' I suppose I was nearer thirty than twenty before I was anything of an artist.
At about twelve and onward I wrote an epic of six thousand lines h la Walter Scott, — full of battles, deal- ing too with sea and mountain scenery, — with Scott's regularity of octo-syllables and his occasional varieties. Though the performance was very likely worth nothing I never felt myself more truly inspired. I wrote as much as seventy lines at one time, and used to go shouting them about the fields in the dark. All these early efforts have been destroyed, only my brother-in-law Edmund Lushington begged for a page or two of the Scott poem. Somewhat later (at fourteen) I wrote a Drama in blank verse, which I have still, and other things. It seems to me, I wrote them all in perfect metre."
These poems made my grandfather say with pardon- able pride, " If Alfred die, one of our greatest poets will have gone " : and at another time, " I should not wonder if Alfred were to revive the greatness of his relative, William Pitt V
His grandmother, the sister of the Reverend Samuel Turner, would assert: "Alfred's poetry all comes from me." My father remembered her reading to him, when a boy, " The Prisoner of Chillon " very tenderly. Sam Turner, on the contrary, smashed the bottom out of his glass of rum and water on the dinner table, as he inveighed against " this new-fangled Byron."
When at his grandfather's desire my father wrote a poem on his grandmother's death, the old gentleman gave
^ See p. xxii.
1827] UNPOETICAL ANCESTRY. 1 3
him half a guinea with these words, " Here is half a guinea for you, the first you have ever earned by poetry, and take my word for it, the last." He himself was not a great hand at versification. Two lines of his are extant, de- scribing the crest of the Boynes, a goat drinking out of a stream. His younger son had previously made these lines,
On yonder bank a goat is stood, He seems to sip the silver flood,
which were corrected by the old gentleman as follows.
On yonder bank a goat I spy, To sip the flood he seems to try.
Owing to a caprice of my great-grandfather's, my grandfather, who was the elder son, was disin- herited in favour of his only brother, Charles (Tennyson d'Eyncourt % and so deprived of a position for which he would seem to have been well fitted. A neighbouring squire, being told by my great-grandfather of his in- tention, remonstrated, " George, if you do this you'll certainly be damned, you will indeed " ; but, in spite of the remonstrance and the risk, the estate was left away from the elder son.
As compensation for being disinherited, my grand- father was appointed not only Rector of Somersby and Wood Enderby, but also Incumbent of Benniworth and Vicar of Great Grimsby, for those were the days of pluralists. Not that he could have been a grasping man, for on one occasion a wealthy land-owner (whose heir was a remote relation and a poor farm-labourer) an- nounced his intention of leaving all his property to Dr Tenn)rson. But this my grandfather felt was unjust, and accordingly took the first opportunity of offending
^ Charles took the name of dTyncourt because, according to Burke and other heralds, the Tennysons represent the two branches of the old Norman hmSlj of d^Eyncourt.
14 BOYHOOD. [l80©-
his would-be benefactor in order that he might change his mind. The ruse was successful, as the sequel proved, for the estate devolved upon the rightful heir.
Undoubtedly the disinheritance of my grandfather created a feeling of injustice in his mind which descended to his sons, though my father used to reflect in later years how little this early trial personally affected them and the d'Eyncourt sons ; the cousins were always good friends.
My grandfather had no real calling for the ministry of the Church, yet he faithfully strove to do his duty. He was a man of great ability, and considerably in advance of his age in his theological tenets, although in his sermons he could not escape the academic style of his time ; for example : " The benevolent genius of Christianity affords the strongest presumption of its verity. The Almighty, so infinitely benevolent, can only wish to ensure the happiness of His creatures in the truths which He communicates, in the laws which He imposes, and in the doctrines which He promulgates. This indeed is so self-evident that it might be laid down as a rule that if any religion have not a benevolent tendency, this very circumstance is a sufficient refutation of its proceeding from God. What is revealed to us by Christianity but the Redemption of the whole human race by the merits of a crucified Saviour, and the glorious assurance of a future state of existence ? "
The Lincolnshire folk among whom he lived were in the early part of this century apt to be uncouth and mannerless. A type of rough independence was my grandfather's coachman, who, blamed for not keep- ing the harness clean, rushed into the drawing-room, flung the whole harness on the floor and roared out: "Qean it yourself then." It was perhaps the same man, who at the time of the Reform Bill said, " I
1827] RELIGIOUS IMPRESSIONS. 1 5
suppose, Master Awlfred, your aunt Mrs Bourne will be going up to London before they begin to kill tfie quality^
(This aunt was a rigid Calvinist, who would weep for hours because God was so infinitely good. " Has He not damned," she cried, " most of my friends ? But me^ me He has picked out for eternal salvation, me who am no better than my neighbours." One day she said to her nephew, " Alfred, Alfred, when I look at you, I think of the words of Holy Scripture — * Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.'")
Again the Somersby cook was a decided character, and " Master Awlfred " heard her in some rage against her master and mistress exclaim : " If you raaked out Hell with a smaall-tooth coamb you wean't find their likes," a phrase which long lingered in his memory.
Yet notwithstanding their roughness the poor were fond of the "stem Doctor," as they called him, and would " do anything for him." Here perhaps I should mention that the sense of his father's unkindness and injustice preyed upon his nerves and his health, and caused him at times to be terribly despondent. More than once Alfred, scared by his father's fits of despond- ency, went out thlrough the black night, and threw himself on a grave in the churchyard, praying to be beneath the sod himself ^
^ In one of his books I have found this unfinished prayer, composed by him, and written in his boyish hand ; it begins thus :
'^O Lord God Almighty, high above all height, Omniscient and Omni- present, Whose lifetime is eternity, wilt Thou condescend to behold from the throne of Thy inexpressible Majesty the work of Thine own Hands kneeling before thee? Thou art the God of Heaven and of Earth. Thou hast created the immeasurable sea. Thou hast laid the foundations of the world that it should not be moved for ever. Thou givest and Thou takest life, Thou destroyest and Thou renewest Blessed be Thy name for ever and ever."
The prayer continues with an appeal for pity to Christ — " Who did leave the right hand of the Father to endure the agonies of the crown of thorns," and ''(^ the Cross."
1 6 BOYHOOD, [I8OO-
No doubt the children profited by the dominating force of their father's intellect. A Hebrew and Syriac scholar, he perfected himself in Greek, in order that J he might teach his sons. All that they learnt of lan- guages, of the fine arts, of mathematics, and natural science, until they went to Cambridge, was learnt from him. My father said that he himself received a good but not a regular classical education. At ^ any rate he became an accurate scholar, the author " thoroughly* drummed " into him being Horace ; whom he disliked in proportion. He would lament, "They use «^i^ as a lesson-book at schools, and they will call me *that horrible Tennyson.' It was not till many years after boyhood that I could like Horace. Byron expressed what I felt, 'Then farewell Horace whom I hated so.' Indeed I was so over-dosed with Horace that I hardly do him justice even now that I am old."
The boys had one great advantage, the run of their father's excellent library. Amongst the authors most read by them were Shakespeare, Milton, Burke, Gold- smith, Rabelais, Sir William Jones, Addison, Swift, Defoe, Cervantes, Bunyan and Buffon.
Dr Tennyson's social powers were famous through- out the country side. The tradition lingered long among old barristers that, as young men, when they came to Spilsby on circuit, they were always anxious to persuade Dr Tennyson to dine with them because of his geniality and brilliant conversation.
To this sketch of my grandfather, my uncle Arthur adds a few words.
A scene comes before me of Frederick, Charles and Alfred having a regular scrimmage with lesson-books, and of my father suddenly coming round the corner. I didn't wait to see what happened, but bolted; our father's tall form appearing was generally at such moments the signal for a regular " scatter," but,
/
1827] THE BROTHERS AT SOMERSBY. IJ
although very severe, he had great tenderness of heart I can well recollect him by my bedside, almost weeping, when I had a bad paroxysm of croup. Alfred had the same tenderness in spite of his somewhat gruff manner : he was notable among his brothers for strength and independence of character. His was a very gentle nature and I never remember quarrelling with him. He was very kind to us who were younger than he was, and I remember his tremendous excitement when he got hold of Bewick for the first time : how he paced up and down the lawn for hours studying him, and how he kept rushing in to us in the schoolroom to show us some of the marvellous wood-cuts, and to let us have a share in this new pleasure of his. Indeed he was always a great reader ; and if he went alone he would take his book with him on his walk. One day in the winter, the snow being deep, he did not hear the Louth mail coming up behind. Suddenly " Ho ! ho ! *' from the coachman roused him. He looked up, and foimd a horse's nose and eyes over his shoulder, as if reading his book. Like my father, Alfred had a great head, so that when I put on his hat it came down over my face. He too like my father^ had a powerful frame, a splendid physique, and we used to have gymnastics over the large beam in his attic den, which was in the gable looking westward. Alfred and I often took long rambles together, and on one particular afternoon, when we were in the home Relds talking of our respective futures, he said most emphatically, " Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous." (From his earliest years he felt that he was a poet, and earnestly trained himself to be worthy of his vocation.) For our less active amusements we carved in wood and moulded with clay, and one of my earliest recollections of Alfred is watching him form with clay a Gothic archway in the bole of an old tree.
In the poem of "Isabel" my father more or less described his mother, who was a "remarkable and saintly woman." " One of the most innocent and tender- hearted ladies I ever saw," wrote Edward Fitzgerald.
^ He stood six feet two, and was strong and energetic. Tim Green, the Somersby rat-catcher, a great ally of the young Tennysons, said, <<I remember the cud Doctor. What a dip he used to goa betweeSn them choodrcbes o^ Somersby an' Enderby ! **
}8 BOYHOOD. [l809-
She devoted herself entirely to her husband and her children.
The world hath not another (Tho* all her fairest forms are types of thee, And thou of God in thy great charity) Of such a finish'd chasten'd purity.
She had been among the beauties of the county. When she was almost eighty, a daughter, under cover of her deafness, ventured to mention the number of offers of marriage which had been made to her mother, naming twenty-four. Suddenly, to the amusement of all present, the old lady said emphatically, and quite simply, as for truth's sake, " No, my dear, twenty-five." She had a great sense of humour, which made her room a paradise for the children. They inherited her love of animals* and her pity "for all wounded wings." And my father was even then a keen observer of the habits of birds and beasts and ants and bees ; was " wise in winged things, and knew the ways of Nature," of which he had the true poet's love. In later life this led to an earnest study of science.
As a boy he would reel ofiF hundreds of lines such as these :
When winds are east and violets blow, And slowly stalks the parson crow.
And
The quick-wing'd gnat doth make a boat Of his old husk wherewith to float To a new life ! all low things range To higher I but I cannot change.
> The boys of a neighbouring village used to bring their dogs to my grandmother^s windows and beat them in order to be bribed to leave ofi^ or to induce her to buy them.
1827] HIS LOVE OF NATURE, 1 9
To the aggravation of the neighbouring gamekeepers he would spring all their traps, and more than one of them threatened that, if they caught " that there young gentleman who was for ever springing the gins," they would duck him in the pond.
He liked to tell of an owl and a monkey of famous memory. Sitting at night by the open window in his own particular little attic (now used as a store-room for apples and lumber), he heard the cry of a young owl and answered it. The owl came nestling up to him, fed out of his hand, and finally took up its per- manent abode with the family. Sometimes it would perch on my grandmother's head, and was so constantly with her that her pet monkey was made jealous. The monkey was a droll fellow: he would imitate the house- maid scrubbing the floor, and his prime luxury was to singe the hair of his back at a candle. One luckless day he was sitting in a corner of the sill outside the attic window, the owl in the opposite corner. The monkey glared at the owl ; the owl watched the monkey with solemn round eyes, — the monkey, advancing and retiring, and gibbering like a little Frenchman all the while. The little Frenchman at last plucked up courage, rushed at his solemn opponent, took him by the leg, and hurled him to the ground. "One of the most comical scenes," my father said, " that I have ever witnessed." The owl was eventually drowned in the well; dying, it is supposed, a Narcissus death of vanity.
"Like Wordsworth on the mountains," said Fitz- gerald, "Alfred too, when a lad abroad on the wold, sometimes of a night with the shepherd, watched not only the flock on the greensward, but also
the fleecy star that bears Andromeda far off Atlantic seas " :
20 BOYHOOD. [l8(»-
Two of Alfred's earliest lines were :
The rays of many a rolling central star,
Aye flashing earthwards, have not reach'd us yet
There is a story current in the family that Frederick, when an Eton school-boy, was shy of going to a neigh- bouring dinner-party to which he had been invited. " Fred," said his younger brother, " think of Herschel's great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that."
Of the few families in the neighbourhood the Ten- nysons were most intimate with the Rawnsleys. Mr Rawnsley, who was Rector of Halton, was appointed by Dr Tennyson one of the guardians of his children. For his son Drummond my father had a strong friendship which lasted through life, having been first attracted to him by a certain unworldliness of nature.
In the summer-time Dr and Mrs Tennyson took their holiday by the seaside, mostly at Mablethorpe. From his boyhood my father had a passion for the sea, and especially for the North Sea in wild weather —
The hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts :
and for the glorious sunsets over the flats —
The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh.
The cottage * to which the family resorted was close under the sea bank, " the long low line of tussocked dunes." " I used to stand on this sand-built ridge," my father said, " and think that it was the spine-bone of the world." From the top of this, the immense sweep of marsh inland ^ and the whole weird strangeness of the place greatly
' Or even a lowly cottage whence we see StretchM wide and wild the waste enormous marsh, Where from the frequent bridge, Like emblems of infinity, The trench^ waters run from sky to sky.
"Ode to Memory."
1827] "poems by two BROTHERS." 21
moved him. On the other side of the bank at low tide there is an immeasurable waste of sand and clay. "Nottingham and Lincoln foalk moastly coom 'ere," one of the Mablethorpe fishermen grumbled, "a vast sight of 'em, soom taime (time), but they saays it is a mighty dool plaace with a deal o' sand, becos there isn't naw band nor pier like : but howsoomever, the wind blaws the poor things a bit, an' they weshes their bodies i' the waaves." At night on the shore, when the tide is full, the sound is amazing. All around there is a low murmur of seething foam,
Like armies whispering where great echoes be.
"Nowhere," wrote Drummond Rawnsley, "are the waves in a storm higher than in the North Sea": no- where have the breakers a more thunderous roar than on this Lincolnshire coast: and sometimes at half-tide the clap of the wave falling on the flat shore can be heard for miles, and is accurately described in "The Last Tournament":
As the crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-shore. Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves. Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud. From less and less to nothing.
Fitzgerald writes: "I used to say Alfred never should have left old Lincolnshire, where there were not only such good seas, but also such fine Hill and Dale among *The Wolds,' which he was brought up in, as people in general scarce thought on."
In 1827 my uncle Frederick went from Eton, where he was captain of the school, to Trinity College, Cam- bridge : and in March of this year Poems by Two Brothers
22 BOYHOOD. [l800^
was published by Jackson of Louth. When these poems were written, my uncle Charles was between sixteen and eighteen, and my father between fifteen and seventeen.
The brothers were promised the liberal sum of ;^20, having however to take more than half of this in books out of Jackson's shop. According to the fashion of the day, quotations from various authors were freely inter- spersed throughout the little volume, and the motto at the beginning was " Haec nos novimus esse nihil." Their preface states, "We have passed the Rubicon and we leave the rest to fate, though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged • from the shade ' and courted notoriety."
As an outburst of youthful poetic enthusiasm, the book is not wanting in interest and a certain charm, although full of the boyish imitation of other poets. Unlike Swift, who exclaimed on re-reading his early work, " What a genius I had when I wrote that I " my father could hardly tolerate what he called his "early rot." But latterly he said, " Some of it is better than I thought it was ! " In consequence of the unearthing of this MS by Messrs Jackson it fell to me to publish the second edition, sixty years after the publication of the first, and to endeavour to initial the poems. Yet I cannot be sure of the authorship of each, even though the original manuscript has been in my hands, for the poems are not always copied out by their respective authors. But the initials which I gave received the sanction and authority of my uncle Frederick, as far as his memory served him. He himself was the author of four of the poems, that had generally been attributed to Charles.
The only contemporary criticism is in the Literary Chronicle (May 1827):
This little volume exhibits a pleasing union of kindred tastes, and contains several little pieces of considerable merit.
1827] EARLY UNPUBLISHED POEMS. 23
My uncle Charles would say that, on the afternoon of publication, my father and he hired a carriage with some of the money earned ; and driving away fourteen miles, over the wolds and the marsh, to Mablethorpe, their favourite waste sea-shore, "shared their triumph with the winds and waves."
Unpublished Poems of Boyhood.
(Fragments written at 14 or 15 years of age.)
I showed the following early fragments to the late Master of Balliol and by his advice I publish them. He said, " They are most original, and it is wonderful how the whelp could have known such things." They were omitted from the Poems by Two Brothers^ being thought too much out of the common for the public taste.
{A sceney written at 14.) Act I, Sc. i (In Spain).
DRAMATIS PERSONiE.
Carlos (a spirited stripling with a spice of suspicion and a pre- ponderance of pride) .
Michael (his old attendant).
Moonlight
Carl. Hear you the sound of wheels?
Mich. No, faith, not I.
Carl. Methinks they tarry somewhat. What's the
clock ?
Mich. Half way toward midnight. Carl. Why, they should be here.
Mich. 'Tis a clear night, they will be here anon.
Carl. Hist! what was that?
24 BOYHOOD. [I8OO-
Mich. The night gale in those trees.
CarL How beautifully looks the moonbeam through The knotted boughs of this long avenue Of thick dark oaks, that arch their arms above, Coeval with the battlemented towers Of my old ancestors ! I never look upon them but I glow With an enthusiastic love of them. Methinks an oak-tree never should be planted But near the dwelling of some noble race ; For it were almost mockery to hang it O'er the thatch'd cottage, or the snug brick box Of some sleek citizen. Ye proud aristocrats whose lordly shadows, Chequer'd with moonlight's variation, Richly and darkly girdle these gray walls, — I and my son's sons and our offspring, all Shall perish, and their monuments, with forms Of the unfading marble carved upon them. Which speak of us to other centuries. Shall perish also, but ye still shall flourish In your high pomp of shade, and make beneath Ambrosial gloom. Thou dost remember, Michael, How, when a boy, I joy'd to place me on The hollow-stemm'd and well-nigh leafless oak Which towers above the lake that ripples out In the clear moonshine.
Mich. You were wont to call it
Your throne.
CarL I was so, Michael.
Mich. You'd sit there
From dawn till sunset looking far away On the blue mountains, and most joyful when The wanton wind came singing lustily Among the moss-grown branches, and threw back Your floating hair.
1827] FRAGMENT OF A PLAY, 25
Carl. Ha! Ha! Why even then
My Spanish blood ran proudly in my veins.
Mich. Ay, Ay, I warrant you, and when I came
And would have call'd you down to break your
fast, You would look down and knit your baby brows Into your father's frown, and beckon me Away.
Carl. Ha! Ha! 'twas laughable, and yet
It show'd the seeds of innate dignity That were within me ; did it not, good Michael ?
Mich. And when your age had somewhat riper grown, And I was wont to dandle you upon My knee, and ask you whether you would be A great man in your time. You'd weave your waxen fingers in these locks (They ar^ gray now) and tell me you were great Already in your birth.
CarL Ha! by St James
Mine was no vulgar mind in infancy, Ev'n then the force of nature and high birth Had writ nobility upon my brow. Hark! they are coming.
Extr(utfrom a Play also written at 14,
(according to an entry made by my grand&ther at the beginning
of the MS).
The Devil (speaks) (got fig to the timepiece).
Half after midnight! these mute moralizers, Pointing to the unheeded lapse of hours, Become a tacit eloquent reproach
26 BOYHOOD. [1809-
Unto the dissipation of this Earth,
There is a clock in Pandemonium,
Hard by the burning throne of my great grandsire,
The slow vibrations of whose pendulum,
With click-clack alternation to and fro,
Sound "Ever, Never" thro' the courts of Hell,
Piercing the wrung ears of the damn'd that writhe
Upon their beds of flame, and whensoever
There may be short cessation of their wails,
Through all that boundless depth of fires is heard
The shrill and solemn warning " Ever, Never " :
Then bitterly I trow they turn and toss
And shriek and shout to drown the thrilling noise.
Half after midnight ! {Looking again at the timepiece.)
Wherefore stand I here? Methinks my tongue runs twenty knots an hour: I must unto mine office.
{Exit abruptfy.)
After reading the Bride of Lammemtoor he wrote the following:
The Bridal.*
The lamps were bright and gay
On the merry bridal-day. When the merry bridegroom
Bore the bride away! A merry, merry bridal,
A merry bridal-day! And the chapel's vaulted gloom
Was misted with perfume. "Now, tell me, mother, pray.
Why the bride is white as clay, Although the merry bridegroom
Bears the bride away,
* Copyright, Z897, by The Macmillan Company.
1827] "THE BRIDAL." 27
On a merry, merry bridal,
A merry bridal-day? And why her black eyes bum
With a light so wild and stem?" "They revel as they may,"
That skinny witch did say, "For — now the merry bridegroom
Hath borne the bride away — Her thoughts have found their wings
In the dreaming of past things: And though girt in glad array.
Yet her own deep soul says nay: For tho' the merry bridegroom
Hath borne the bride away, A dark form glances quick
Thro' her worn brain, hot and sick." And so she said her say —
This was her roundelay — That tho' the merry bridegroom
Might lead the bride away, Dim grief did wait upon her,
In glory and in honour.
In the hall, at close of day.
Did the people dance and play, For now the merry bridegroom
Hath borne the bride away. He from the dance hath gone
But the revel still goes on. Then a scream of wild dismay
Thro' the deep hall forced its way, Altho' the merry bridegroom
Hath borne the bride away; And, staring as in trance.
They were shaken from the dance.
28 BOYHOOD. [I8OO-
Then they found him where he lay
Whom the wedded wife did slay, Tho' he a merry bridegroom
Had borne the bride away, And they saw her standing by.
With a laughing crazed eye. On the bitter, bitter bridal.
The bitter bridal-day.
The Coach of Death *
(A fragment)
Far off in the dun, dark Occident,
Behind the burning Sun: Where his gilding ray is never sent,
And his hot steeds never run:
There lies a land of chilling storms,
A region void of light, A land of thin faces and shadowy forms.
Of vapours, and mist, and night.
There never green thing will gaily spring
In that unwholesome air, But the rickety blast runs shrilly and fast
Thro' the bony branches there.
When the shadow of night's eternal wings
Envelopes the gloomy whole, And the mutter of deep-mouth 'd thunderings
Shakes all the starless pole,
Thick sobs and short shrill screams arise
Along the sunless waste. And the things of past days with their horrible eyes
Look out from the cloudy vast.
* Copyright, 1897, by Th« Macmillan Company.
827] "THE COACH OF DEATH." 29
And the earth is dry, tho' the pall of the sky
Leave never an inch of blue; And the moaning wind before it drives
Thick wreaths of cloudy dew.
Whoever walks that bitter ground
His limbs beneath him fail; His heart throbs thick, his brain reels sick:
His brow is clammy and pale.
But some have hearts that in them bum
With power and promise high. To draw strange comfort from the earth,
Strange beauties from the sky.
Dark was the night, and loud the roar
Of wind and mingled shower. When there stood a dark coach at an old Inn door
At the solemn midnight hour.
That Inn was built at the birth of Time:
The walls of lava rose. Cemented with the burning slime
Which from Asphaltus flows.
No sound of joy, no revelling tones
Of carouse were heard within: But the rusty sign of a skull and cross-bones
Swung creaking before the Inn.
No taper's light look'd out on the night,
But ever and anon Strange fiery eyes glared fiercely thro'
The windows of shaven bone.
And the host came forth, and stood alone
And still in the dark doorway: There was not a tinge on each high cheek bone.
But his face was a yellow gray.
30 BOYHOOD. [l80©-
The skin hung lax on his long thin hands ;
No jolly host was he; For his shanks were shrunken to willow wands
And his name was Atrophy !
Dimly the travellers look'd thro' the glooms, Worn and wan was their gaze, I trow,
As the shriveird forms of the shadowy grooms Yoked the skeleton horses to.
They lifted their eyes to the dead, pale skies,
And above the barkless trees They saw the green verge of the pleasant earth,
And heard the roar of her seas.
They see the light of their blest firesides,
They hear each household voice: The whisper'd love of the fair young wives;
And the laugh of their rose-lipp'd boys.
The summer plains with their shining leaves,
The summer hills they see; The dark vine leaves round the rustling eaves,
And the forests, fair and free.
There came a gaunt man from the dark Inn door,
A dreadnought coat had he: His bones crack'd loud, as he stept thro' the crowd,
And his boots creak'd heavily.
Before his eyes so grim and calm
The tingling blood grew chill. As each put a farthing into his palm,
To drive them where he will.
His sockets were eyeless, but in them slept
A red infernal glow; As the cockroach crept, and the white fly leapt
About his hairless brow.
1827] "THE COACH OF DEATH." 3I
They mounted slow in their long black cloaks,
The tears bedimm'd their sight : The grim old coachee strode to the box,
And the guard gasp'd out "All's right"
The leaders bounded, the guard's horn sounded: Far away thro' the night ran the lengthened tones:
As the quick wheels brush'd, and threw up the dust Of dead men's pulverised bones.
Whose blood in its liveliest course would not pause
At the strife of the shadowy wheels, The chattering of the fleshless jaws,
And the beat of the horny heels?
Deep dells of snow sunk on each side below
The highway, broad and flat. As the coach ran on, and the sallow lights shone
Dimly and blurly with simmering fat.
Vast wastes of starless glooms were spread
Around in the chilling air. And heads without bodies and shapes without heads
Went leaping here and there.
O Coachee, Coachee, what lights approach
With heavenly melodies? Oh! those are the lights of the Paradise coach,
That so gaily meet their eyes!
With pleasant hymns they soothe the air
Of death, with songs of pride: With sackbut, and with dulcimer,
With psaltery they ride.
These fear not the mists of unwholesome damps
That through that region rove. For all wreath 'd with green bays were the gorgeous lamps.
And a bright archangel drove.
32 BOYHOOD. [l827
They passed (an inner spirit fed
Their ever-burning fires,) With a solemn burst of thrilling light,
And a sound of stringed lyres.
With a silver sound the wheels went round,
The wheels of burning flame; Of beryl, and of amethyst
Was the spiritual frame.
Their steeds were strong exceedingly:
And rich was their attire: Before them flow'd a fiery stream;
They broke the ground with hoofs of fire.
They glitter'd with a stedfast light,
The happy spirits within ; As stars they shone, in raiment white.
And free from taint of sin.
CHAPTER II*
CAMBRIDGE.
1 828-1 830.
I past beside the reverend walls
In which of old I wore the gown ;
I roved at random thro* the town, And saw the tumult of the halb ;
And heard once more in College fanes The storm their high-built organs make, And thunder-music, rolling, shake
The prophets blazoned on the panes :
And caught once more the distant shout, The measured pulse of racing oars Among the willows ; paced the shores
And many a bridge, and all about
The same gray fiats again, and felt The same, but not the same ; and last Up that long walk of limes I past
To see the rooms in which he dwelt.
Another name was on the door : I linger^ ; all within was noise Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys
That crashM the glass, and beat the floor ;
Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land.
On February 20th, 1828, my father and my uncle Charles matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where their elder brother Frederick was already a dis- tinguished scholar, and had won the University medal for the best Greek ode on the Pyramids.
* Copyright, 1897, by The Macmilkn Company. T. L 33 3
34 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
Of their entrance into Cambridge, — my father told me that they had left the coach and were walking down Trumpington Street in the dusk of the evening, when a proctor addressed him, "What are you doing without your cap and gown, sir, at this time of night ? " To which, not being aware of the dignity of the per- sonage who addressed him, he promptly retorted, " I should like to know what business it can be of yours, sir."
They first occupied rooms at No. 1 2 Rose Crescent, moving afterwards to Trumpington Street, No. 57 Corpus Buildings. Although they knew but few men when be- ginning their University career, and were shy and reserved, they soon joined themselves to a set of friends who were all more or less remarkable. At first my father writes to his aunt, Mrs Russell : " I am sitting owl- like and solitary in my rooms (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles). The hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel, the shouts of drunken Gown and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur. I wish to Heaven I had Prince Hussain's fairy carpet to transport me along the deeps of air to your coterie. Nay, I would even take up with his brother Aboul-something's glass for the mere pleasure of a peep. What a pity it is that the golden days of Faerie are over ! What a misery not to be able to consolidate our gossa- mer dreams into reality ! When, my dearest Aunt, may I hope to see you again ? I know not how it is, but I feel isolated here in the midst of society. The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monoto- nous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so much matter of fact. None but dry-headed, calculating, angular little gentlemen can take much delight in them.
I have been seeking * Falkland' for a long time with- out success. Those beautiful extracts from it, which you showed me at Tealby, haunt me incessantly ; but wishes, I think, like telescopes reversed, seem to set their objects at a greater distance."
1880] HIS APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER, 35
" I can tell you nothing of his college days," writes Edward Fitzgerald to a friend, " for I did not' know him till they were over, tho' I had seen him two or three times before : I remember him well, a sort of H)rperion."
With his poetic nature, and warmth of heart, he soon made his way. Fanny Kemble, who used to visit her brother John, said of him when at College, "Alfred Tennyson was our hero, the great hero of our day." Another friend describes him as " Six feet high, broad- chested, strong-limbed, his face Shakespearian, with deep eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark wavy hair, his head finely poised, his hand the admiration of sculptors, long fingers with square tips, soft as a child's but of great size and strength. What struck one most about him was the union of strength with refinement." On seeing him first come into the Hall at Trinity, Thompson ^ said at once, " That man must be a poet." Arthur Hallam ** looked up to him as to a great poet and an elder brother ^"
Hallam said to Trench in 1832: "Alfred's mind is what it always was, or rather, brighter, and more vigorous. I regret, with you, that you have never had the oppor- tunity of knowing more of him. His nervous tempera- ment and habits of solitude give an appearance of affectation to his manner, which is no interpreter of the man, and wears off on further knowledge. Perhaps you would never become very intimate, for certainly your bents of mind are not the same, and at some points they intersect ; yet I think you would hardly fail to see much for love, as well as for admiration." Blakesley described Alfred as " Truly one of the mighty of the earth."
The friends among whom he lived were Spedding (author of the Life of Bacon), Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), Trench (afterwards Archbishop of Dublin),
* Afterwards Master of Trinity.
* A. H. Hallam was born on February ist, 181 1.
\/
36 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
Alford (afterwards Dean of Canterbury), Brookfield, Blakesley (afterwards Dean of Lincoln), Thompson, Stephen Spring Rice, Merivale (afterwards Dean of Ely), J. M. Kemble, Heath (Senior Wrangler 1832), Charles BuUer, R, Monteith, Tennant, and above all Hallam. Some summers ago my father and I went to see Hallam 's rooms, at No. 3, G, New Court, in which with these friends he had spent so many happy hours. Of this band of men Lord Houghton spoke in 1866 at the opening of the New Cambridge Union: "I am inclined to believe that the members of that generation were, for the wealth of their promise, a rare body of men such as this University has seldom contained." They were a genial, high-spirited, poetical ^ set, full of speculation and of enthusiasm for the great literature of the past, and for the modern schools of thought, and despised rhetoric and sentimentalism. Fitzgerald comments thus in one of his unpublished MS notes :
The German School, with Coleridge, Julius Hare, etc. to ex- pound, came to reform all our notions. I remember that Livy and Jeremy Taylor were the greatest poets next to Shakespeare. I am not sure if you were not startled at hearing that Eutropius was the greatest lyric poet except Pindar. You hadn't known he was a poet at all. I remember A. T quoting Hallam (the great historian) as pronouncing Shakespeare "the greatest man." I thought such dicta rather peremptory for a philosopher. " Well," said A. T, " the man one would wish perhaps to show as a sample of mankind to those in another planet." He used sometimes to quote Milton as the sublimest of all poets, and his two similes, one about the " gunpowder ore," and the other about "the fleet," as the grandest of all similes. He thought that " * Lycidas * was a touchstone of poetic taste." Of Dryden, " I don't know how it is, but Dryden always seems greater than he shows himself to be."
^ The modem poets in the ascendant among them were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats; but Byron^s ''comet blaze *^ was evidently on the wane.
1830] HIS INSIGHT INTO CHARACTER, 37
His friends noted that my father had from the first a deep insight into character, and would often turn upon them with a sudden terse criticism when they thought him far away in the clouds \
Fitzgerald remembered that of someone suddenly pronouncing a dogma he said, " That's the swift decision of one who sees only half the truth " ;
And of a very different character, somewhat apolo- getic, " There's a want of central dignity in him."
A few of his Cambridge contemporaries have been drawn in verse by him^
The then well-known Cambridge orator S — was partly described in the poem, " A Character." He was "a very plausible, parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at the Union Debating Society."
Another verse-portrait my father quoted to me, which he remembered with pleasure that Hallam had praised :
^ <'We were looking one day at the portndt of an elderly politidan in his bland, family aspect : A. T. (with his eye-glass), ' It looks rather like a retired panther.* So true !" MS Note, E. F. G.
* Of Brookfield he wrote in 1875 for Lord Lyttelton^s preface to ^* Sermons, by the late Rev. William Henry Brookfield ^ :
Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes, How oft we two have heard St Mary's chimes ! How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest, Would echo helpless laughter to your jest ! How oft with him we paced that walk of limes, Him, the lost light of those dawn-golden times.
(It was of him that the late Dr Thompson wrote: — •*He was for the most amusing man I ever met, or shall meet. At my age it is not likely that I shall ever again see a whole party lying on the floor for purposes of unrestrained laughter, while one of their number is pouring forth, with a perfectly grave face, a succession of imaginary dialogues between characters, real and fictitious, one exceeding another in humour and drollery.^)
Of Kemble my father said in a sonnet published in 1830 :
My hope and heart is with thee — thou wilt be A latter Luther and a soldier priest.
38 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
( Unpublished^
Thy soul is like a landskip, friend,
Steeple, and stream, and forest lawn.
Most delicately overdrawn With the first twilight of the even, Clear-edged, and showing every bend
Of each dark hill against the Heaven, Nor wanting many a sombre mound,
Stately and mild, and all between Valleys full of solemn sound,
And hoary holts on uplands green. And somewhat loftier antient heights Touch'd with Heaven's latest lights.
Of Blakesley he said, " He ought to be Lord Chancellor, for he is a subtle and powerful reasoner, and an honest man." Blakesley, he observed another time, was honestly indignant at gaining the Chancellor's Medal, which, he asserted, " ought to have gone to young Kennedy."
Later, of James Spedding he remarked, " He was the Pope among us young men — the wisest man I know."
Of Hallam himself, " He would have been known, if he had lived, as a great man but not as a great poet ; he was as near perfection as mortal man could be \"
Whewell, who was his tutor, he called " the lion-like man," and had for him a great respect. It is reported that Whewell, recognizing his genius, tolerated in him certain informalities which he would not have overlooked in other men. Thus, " Mr Tennyson, what's the compound interest of a penny put out at the Christian era up to the present time ? " was Whewell's good-natured call to
^ " And over those ethereal eyes The bar of Michael Angelo.
These lines I wrote from what Arthur Hallam said after reading of the prominent ridge of bone over the eyes of Michael Angelo : 'Alfred, look over my eyes ; surely I have the bar of Michael Angelo !'" A. T.
1880] WHEWELL. 39
attention in the Lecture Room while my father was reading Virgil under the desk.
Once, when Whewell had made himself unpopular, a tumult arose among the undergraduates, who lined the street from the Senate House to Trinity Gate and hooted him, shouting "Billy Whistle!" (Whewell's nickname). As he passed between them, Hallam, Spring Rice, and my father, raised a cheer for him. He saw my father and bade him come instantly to his rooms. Whewell began, " I was sorry to see, Mr Tennyson, that you were at the head of that very disorderly mob outside the Senate House." " But," answered my father, " my friends and I were not heading the mob, we were cheering you!" Whereat Whewell said nothing, but smiled grimly to himself with evident pleasure, inviting him to breakfast next morning.
Another Cambridge story about Whewell, but perhaps of later date, my father would tell somewhat in this way. At 1 2 o'clock one night, horns and trumpets and bugles and drums began to play from all the windows round Trinity New Court, and a man, who had been expelled that day, strummed on a piano which had been set in the middle of the lawn; and there was the fiend s own row. Presently Whewell, who lived in Nevile's Court, next to the New Court, was heard thundering at his door which had been tied with a rope ; • rpU fiev opi^ar l(Sav ' and at the third charge he broke through, rushed out, found all the windows closed, lights extinguished, dead silence every- where, only the expelled man standing immovable by the piano under a cold round moon. Whewell strode to the piano, the expelled man ran for his life round and round the colonnades of Nevile's Court ; thrice he ran round, Whewell pursuing. At last Whewell caught him. " Do you know who I am, sir ? " said Whewell, panting. " Yes," was the answer, " Old Whistle, who made that mistake in his Dynamics^ Thereupon Whewell, seeing that he was the man who had been expelled, took him by the
40 CAMBRIDGE. [lS;:8-
scruff of the neck, carried him to the great gate, and shot him out like bad rubbish.
As a young man my father's friends have often described him to me as having Johnsonian common sense and a rare power of expression, very genial, full of enjoyment, full of sensitiveness and full of humour, though with the passionate heart of a poet, and sometimes feeling the melancholy of life. He passed through " moods of misery unutterable," but he eventually shook them off. He remembered how, when in London almost for the first time, one of these moods came over him, as he realized that " in a few years kll its inhabitants would be lying horizontal, stark and stiff in their coffins."
Despite such passages of gloom he worked on at his poems, wrote Latin and Greek odes\ read his classics
^ Before he had left Somersby for Cambridge, he had written in Greek hexameters an Homeric book on the Seven against Thebes, and an Ovidian poem about the death of a young girl who had died for love of the Apollo Belvedere.
In his note-book, mixed up with translations of Aristophanes, and of Greek philosophers, and with astronomical diagrams, I find this fragment, mainly of value as showing at what an early date physical science began to penetrate his verse :
The Moon. ( Unpublished fragment^
######
Deep glens I found, and sunless gulfs. Set round with many a toppling spire,
And monstrous rocks from craggy snouts Disploding globes of roaring fire.
Large as a human eye the sun
Drew down the West his feeble lights;
And then a night, all moons, confused The shadows from the icy heights.
[*' A night, all moons,^* means that when seen from the airless moon all the principal stars and planets would be very large and bright in the black heavensi and strike the eye there as the moon strikes the eye here.]
1880] HIS INTEREST IN POLITICS. 4 1
and history and natural science ^ He also took a lively interest in politics. He was among the young supporters of the Anti-slavery Convention, and advocated the Measure for abolishing subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, while admiring as statesmen Canning, Peel, and the Duke of Wellington. England was in a state of fer- ment with the hope or dread of the Reform Bill. Farms were fired, ricks were burnt, and "sanguine Lazarus felt a vacant hand Fill" with the rich man's purse. In the poem addressed to Mary Boyle my father tells how he helped to " hand the bucket from the well," and to quench a conflagration in a homestead near Cambridge.
At one of these farm fires he heard a countryman saying, " Now we shall get our taters cheaper." " You fools," said my father, although he largely sympathized with the labourers in their demands, " you are all going the way to make taters dearer." Some undergraduates with over-zeal began to pull down the farmer's house in order to help him to preserve the materials from fire. The poor man held them back, comically but naturally remonstrating, "Leave me, sirs, I pray you, the little property that the fire has spared ! "
My father's note-book contains these unpublished lines:
I, loving Freedom for herself.
And much of that which is her form, Wed to no faction in the state,
A voice before the storm, I mourn in spirit when I think
The year, that comes, may come with shame. Lured by the cuckoo-voice that loves
To babble its own name.
That "deep chord which Hampden smote" pulsed
^ '^ I kept a tame snake in my rooms. I liked to watch his wonderful sinu- osities on iht carpet.^ A. T.
y
42 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
through the life of the young men of the day. These "^ riots of the poorer classes filled my father with an earnest
desire to do something to help those who lived in misery
among the " warrens of the poor." Indeed from first to .,• last he always preached the onward progress of liberty,
while steadily opposed to revolutionary license —
Freedom free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.
Asked what politics he held : " I am of the same politics as Shakespeare \ Bacon, and every sane man."
Carlyle's account of Sterling best describes, as far as I can gather, the typical intellectual undergraduate of my father s set : who hated the narrow and ignorant Toryism to be found in country districts : who loathed parties and sects : who reverenced the great traditions and the great men of past ages, and eagerly sympathized with the mis- fortunes and disabilities of his fellow-men.
He tells how Sterling, famous already for the brilliance of his talk, had at Cambridge "a wide and rather genial circle of comrades." They had among them a society called the "Apostles": of which my father was an early member. " On stated evenings," Carlyle goes on, "was much logic, and other spiritual fencing, and ingenuous collision — probably of a really superior quality in that kind; for not a few of the then disputants have since proved themselves men of parts, and attained distinction in the intellectual walks of life."
It is of the " Apostles " that Sterling writes to Trench : " Pray let me see you as soon as you reach London, and
* " Some critics," he said to me more than once, "object to Shakespeare^s aristocratic view of his clowns, because he makes them talk such poor stuff, but they forget that his clowns occasionally speak as real truths as Hamlet, and that sometimes they utter very profound sayings. That is thie glory of Shakespeare, he can give you the incongruity of things."
1830] THE "APOSTLES." 43
in the mean time commend me to the brethren, who, I trust, are waxing daily in religion and radicalism."
Arthur Hallam, in a letter to Gladstone, says of Frederick Maurice : " The effects which he has pro- duced on the minds of many at Cambridge by the single creation of that society of 'Apostles ' (for the spirit though not the form was created by him) is far greater than I can dare to calculate, and will be felt, both directly and indirectly, in the age that is upon us."
There were regular meetings of the society as distin- guished from the almost daily gatherings in one or another man's rooms, at all of which much coffee was drunk, much tobacco smoked. The Apostle who proposed the subject for discussion, generally stood before the mantel- piece, and said his say. Douglas Heath writes that the image he has carried away of my father is of one "sitting in front of the fire, smoking and meditating, and now and then mingling in the conversation." With one short phrase he was wont to sum up the issue of the arguments. Heath continues : " I cannot satisfy myself as to the time when I became an Apostle, or when I made acquaintance with A. T. My belief is that he had already become an honorary member extraordinary. In the usual course a member had to read essays in regular succession, or give a dinner in default during a certain period, after which he became honorary. But A. T. was, I suppose, bored by this, and the society was con- tent to receive him, his poetry and wisdom unfettered." " Ghosts " was the subject of an essay written by my father for the Society, but he was too shy to deliver it. The preface alone has survived ^
These friends not only debated on politics but read their Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, Bentham, Descartes and Kant, and discussed such questions as the Origin of Evil, the Derivation of Moral Senti-
* For the prologae of " Ghost$ " see Appendix, p. 497.
h
44 CAMBRIDGE. [l82S-.
ments, Prayer and the Personality of God^ Among the Cambridge papers I find a remarkable sentence on " Prayer" by Arthur Hallam.
With respect to prayer, you ask how am I to distinguish the operations of God in me from motions in my own heart ? Why should you distinguish them or how do you know there is any distinction ? Is God less God because He acts by general laws when He deals with the common elements of nature ?... That fatal mistake which has embarrassed the philosophy of mind with infinite confusion, the mistake of setting value on a thing's origin rather than on its character, of assuming that composite must be less excellent than simple, has not been slow to extend its deleterious influence over the field of practical religion.
My father seems to have propounded in some college discussion the theory, that the "development of the human body might possibly be traced from the radiated, vermicular, molluscous and vertebrate organisms." The question of surprise put to him on this proposition was " Do you mean that the human brain is at first like a madrepore's, then like a worm's, etc. ? but this cannot be for they have no brain*."
At this time, with one or two of his more literary friends, he took great interest in the work which Hallam
liad undertaken, a translation from the Vita Nuova of
Vjjoc
* Three questions discussed by the Society were : (i) Have Shelley's ms an immoral tendency ? Tennyson votes '' No." (2) Is an intelligible
First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the Universe ? Tennyson votes "No." (3) Is there any rule of moral action beyond general expediency ? Tennyson votes " Aye."
I have a note to my father from Tennant saying: "Last Saturday we had an Apostolic dinner when we had the honour, among other things, of drinking your health. Edmund Lushington and I went away tolerably early; but most of them stayed till past two. John Heath volunteered a song ; Kemble got into a passion about nothing but quickly jumped out again; Blakesley was afraid the Proctor might come in; and Thompson poured large quantities of salt upon Douglas Heath^s head because he talked nonsense."
* Letter from A. H. Hallam. Most of his philosophical and religious letters to my father have been lost
1830] HALLAM AND DANTE. 45
Dante, with notes and prefaces. For this task Hallam, who in 1827 had been in Italy with his parents and had drunk deep of the older Italian literature, says that he was perfecting himself in German and Spanish, and was proposing to plunge into the Florentine historians and the medieval Schoolmen. He writes to my father : " I expect to glean a good deal of knowledge from you concerning metres which may be serviceable, as well for my philosophy in the notes as for my actual handiwork in the text. I purpose to discuss considerably about poetry in general, and about the ethical character of Dante's poetry."
My father said of his friend : " Arthur Hallam could take in the most abstruse ideas with the utmost rapidity and insight, and had a marvellous power of work and thought, and a wide range of knowledge. On one occasion, I remember, he mastered a difficult book of Descartes at a single sitting."
On June 6th, 1829, the announcement was made that my father had won the prize medal for his poem in blank verse on "Timbuctoo V To win the prize in anything
* From Somersby, after his father's death (1831 probably), he wrote to
the printer Metcalfe, who had asked permission to include '' Timbuctoo " in
a collection of Cambridge Prize Poems :
Somersby.
Sir, As you intend to reprint the Cambridge Prize Poems, it would seem odd to leave mine out, tho' for my own part I had much rather you had not thought of it. Prize Poems (without any exception even in favour of Mr. Milman's " Belvedere ") are not properly speaking " Poems " at all, and ought to be forgotten as soon as recited. I could have wished that poor " Timbuctoo " might have been suffered to slide quietly off, with all its errors, into forgetfulness : however as I do not expect to turn you from your purpose of republishing the p* p*, I suppose mine must be printed along with them : only for ''cones of Pyramids,'' which is nonsense (p. 10), I will thank you to substitute '' peaks of Pyramids."
I am, Sir, yours truly,
Alfred Tennyson.
(As the poem is now publbhed this is the sole correction. My fsither would say, ** < The Lover's Tale ' and ' Timbuctoo ' are in no way imitative of
46 CAMBRIDGE. [1828-
but rhymed heroics was an innovation. My grandfather had desired him to compete, so unwillingly he patched up an old poem on " The Battle of Armageddon," and came out prizeman over Milnes, Hallam and others.
Charles Wordsworth (afterwards Bishop of St An- drews) writes to his brother Christopher Wordsworth, Sept. 4th, 1829 (see Annals of my Early Life^ C. Wordsworth, 1890):
What do you think of Tennyson's Prize poem (" Timbuctoo ") ? If such an exercise had been sent up at Oxford, the author would have had a better chance of being rusticated, with the view of his passing a few months at a Lunatic Asylum, than of obtaining the prize. It is certainly a wonderful production ; and if it had come out with Lord Byron's name, it would have been thought as fine as anything he ever wrote.
Arthur Hallam writes, Sept. 14th, 1829, to W. E. Gladstone :
I am glad you liked my queer piece about Timbuctoo. I wrote it in a sovereign vein of poetic scorn for anybody's opinion, who did not value Plato and Milton just as much as I did. The natural consequence was that ten people out of twelve laughed or opened large eyes; and the other two set about praising highly, what was plainly addressed to them, not to people in general. So my vanity would fain persuade me, that, like some of my betters, I "fit audience found, tho' few." My friend Tennyson's poem, which got the prize, will be thought by the ten sober persons afore-mentioned twice as absurd as mine ; and to say the truth, by striking out his prose argument, the Examiners have done all in their power to verify the concluding words, "All was night" The splendid imaginative power that pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.
any poet, and, as far as I know, nothing of mine after the date of ' Timbuctoo^ was imitative. As for being original, nothing can be said which has not been said in some form or another before.")
1830] " TIMBUCTOO." 47
I asked Dean Merivale, last survivor, except Douglas Heath, of that Cambridge set, to give me his recollec- tions. He answered :
Believe me that I have not written a letter for several months, but you will, I am sure, allow me to make this excep- tion to your very kind note. I only wish I could give you any accurate recollection of your honoured father which would be worthy of your acceptance on such an occasion. You have seen, no doubt, the many contemporary diaries of those who rejoice to set down their reminiscences of so great and so loveable a member of their set... May I be excused for recording a recollection of which I was proud — that of being allowed or enjoined by the Vice-Chancellor to declaim his " Timbuctoo ^ " in the Senate House in the summer of 1829, which he declined to do from the modesty which too often beset him ?
The Dean also enclosed the following letter, written, my father said, " under a horror of publicity " which made him " feel as Cowper did."
July 29/A, 1829.
My dear Merivale,
Will you write and tell me whether you can read my poem at Commencement or not, since I must come up to Cambridge if you cannot ? I hope you found my letter sufficiently clear relatively to corrections. The Vice-Chancellor observed to me, " We cannot do these things quite so well by proxy as with the person himself, to whom several of my objections might have been stated and answered immediately." I hope you have somewhat recovered from the shock of your grandmother's sudden death. I consider it as rather remarkable that on the morning when we were at Hampstead I seemed to myself to have some presentiment of it, and could not shake the idea from my mind, though I could not give utterance to
^ Matthew Arnold told G. L. Craik that when, as a youth, he first read "' Timbuctoo ^^ he prophesied the greatness of Tennyson.
48 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
it ; you remember my asking you whether either of your grandmothers was dead, and telling you that both mine were.
Believe me, dear Merivale,
Yours most truly, A. Tennyson.
In 1829 my uncle Charles won a Bell Scholarship by the beauty of his translations. One sentence survived in my father's memory :
" And the ruddy grape shall droop from the desert thorn."
The brothers Charles and Alfred would humorously describe how Much Ado about Nothing was played by their friends in March, 1830. Kemble as Dogberry, Hallam as Verges, Milnes as Beatrice. When Beatrice sat down, her weight was such that she crashed through the couch, and sank on the floor, nothing to be seen but a heap of petticoats, much to the discomfiture of the players and the immeasurable laughter of the spec- tators. The incident used to remind my father by contrast of Kemble's observation to someone who was playing the part of Falstaff , " Pooh, you should see my sister: she does Falstaff better than any man living.'' My father, I may add, was famous in some parts of Shakespeare, especially in Malvolio.
In certain College rooms he was often asked to de- claim the many ballads which he knew by heart, " Clerke Saunders," " Helen of Kirkconnel," " May Margaret," and others : and also his own poems " The Hesperides," "The Lovers Tale" (written 1827), "The Coach of Death " ; and he would improvise verses by the score full of lyrical passion. I quote again from Edward Fitz- gerald : " * Oriana ' Tennyson used to repeat in a way not to be forgotten at Cambridge tables."
For his exercise he either rowed, or fenced, or took
1880] "POEMS, CHIEFLY LYRICAL." 49
long walks, and would go any distance to see "a bubbling brook." " Somehow," he would say, " water is the element I love best of all the four."
His first volume, PoemSy chiefly Lyrical^ was pub- lished in 1830 by Effingham Wilson, also the publisher of Robert Browning's Paracelsus. Favourable reviews appeared by Sir John Bowring in the Westminster^ by Leigh Hunt in the Tatler, and by Arthur Hallam in the Englishman's Magazine.
The Westminster article (January 1831) contained this prophetic notice of " The Poet " :
If our estimate of Mr Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may he read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own work.
Arthur Hallam's enthusiasm was worthy of his true and unselfish friendship, and helped my father through the years of darkness and disparagement that were soon to come.
There is a strange earnestness in his worshijp of beauty which throws a charm over his impassioned song, more easily felt than described, and not to be escaped by those who have once felt it..The features of original genius are clearly and strongly marked. The author imitates no one; we recognize the spirit of his age, but not the individual form of this or that writer. His thoughts bear no more resemblance to Byron or Scott, Shelley or Coleridge, than to Homer or Calderon, Firdusi or Calidasa. We have remarked five distinctive excellencies of his own manner. First, his luxuriance of imagination, and at the same time his control over it. Secondly, his power of embodying himself in ideal characters, or rather moods of character, with such accuracy of adjustment that the circum- stances of the narrative seem to have a natural correspondence with the predominant feeling and, as it were, to be evolved from it by assimilative force. Thirdly, his vivid, picturesque delinea- tion of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of ^tmfusedt to borrow a metaphor fronL science, in a medium of
T.L 4
50 CAMBRIDGE. .^828-
strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of his lyrical measures and the exquisite modulation of harmonious words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed. Fifthly, the elevated habits of thought, implied in these compositions, and importing a mellow soberness of tone, more impressive to our minds than if the author had drawn up a set of opinions in verse, and sought to instruct the understanding rather than to communicate the love of beauty to the heart.
Coleridge S indeed, for whose prose my father never much cared, but to whose poetry, especially " Kubla Khan," " The Ancient Mariner," and " Christabel," he was devoted, was more reserved in his praise about the first two ventures:
I have not read through all Mr Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me ; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understand- ing what metre is^.
" The first * Mariana ' and the * Arabian Nights ' were the two poems that marked the volume (1830) as something to be thought about." ** The affectation " (in
1 Arthur Hallam visited Coleridge at Highgate and wrote about him in his poem of ^ Timbuctoo " :
'^Methought I saw a hot whose every line Wore the pale cast of thought, a good old man. Most eloquent, who spake of things divine. Around him youths were gatherM, who did scan Hb countenance so grand and mild, and drank The sweet sad tears of wisdom."
* Concerning this criticism my fsither said in 1890 : ^ Coleridge did not know much about my poems, for he confounded Charles and me. From what I have heard he may have read Glen-river in 'above the loud Glenriver,* and tendril-twine in the line 'mantled with flowering ten- driltwine^ dactylically ; because I had an absurd antipathy to h3rphens, and put two words together as one word. If that was the case, he might well have wished that I had more sense of metre. But so I, an old man, who get a poem or poems every day, might cast a casual glance at a book, and seeing something which I could not scan or understand, might possibly decide against the book without further consideration."
1880] OPINIONS OF FRIENDS. 5 1
the volume), E. F. G. adds, " was not of the man ; but of the time and society he lived in, and from which he had not yet emerged to his proper and distinct altitude. Two years afterwards he took his ground with * The Miller's Daughter,* 'Palace of Art,' * Dream of Fair Women,' etc."
On the appearance of the poems Hallam wrote the following letter to my grandmother: ,►
My dear MADiOf,
As I have at last the pleasure of sending to Alfred his long-expected book, I take this opportunity of begging that you will accept from me a copy of some poems which I originally intended to have published in the same volume. To this joint publication, as a sort of seal of our friendship, I had long looked forward with a delight which I believe was no way selfish. But there are reasons which have obliged me to change my intention, and withdraw my own share of the work from the Press. One of these was the growing conviction of the exceeding cnideness of style which characterized all my earlier attempts....! have little reason to apprehend your wasting much time over that book, when I send you along with it such a treasure in your son's poetry. He is a true and thorough poet, if ever there was one ; and tho' I fear his book is far too good to be popular, yet I have full faith that he has thrown out sparks that will kindle somewhere, and will vivify young generous hearts in the days that are coming to a clearer perception of what is beautiful and good.
BeUeve me yours very sincerely,
A. H. Hallam.
During the summer my father joined Arthur Hallam, and both started oflf for the Pyrenees, with money for the insurgent allies of Torrijos, — a noble, accomplished, truth- ful man, worthy to be a leader. He it was who had raised the standard of revolt against the Inquisition and the tyranny of Ferdinand, King of Spain. Alfred and
5 2 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
Arthur held a secret meeting with the heads of the conspiracy on the Spanish border, and were not heard of by their friends for some weeks \
John Frere and James Spedding wrote to my uncle Charles inquiring about them, and about my grandfather who was also abroad, and he answers :
To John Frere.
SoMERSBYi July 27/A, 1830.
From Hallam I heard just now : he complains rather of the heat, and says Alfred is delighted with his journey, though regretting the impermanence of his impressions in the hurry of travel. My father has returned from his tour and I am much surprised to see him so well after the neck-break adventures he has encountered. On one occasion, proceeding along in a small carriage over the mountains, he was hurled down a precipice and stunned, but saved himself from certain death by convul- sively grasping a pine that grew out of a ledge : while the driver, carriage and horse were dashed to atoms thousands of feet below him. Again, at the Carnival in Rome, a man was stilettoed in his arms, drawing first suspicion and then violence on his person : the excess of which he prevented by exclaiming that he was an Englishman and had not done the deed. Again, he was suddenly seized with giddiness on the verge of a precipice, and only pre- served by the presence of mind of a person near him. At another (time) he was near being buried alive.
To James Spedding.
I expect the travellers home every day ; I heard twice from Hallam, who mentioned the middle oL September as the most probable period of their return, but a dozen counter-resolutions may come athwart their homeward intention even yet for what I know. Hallam's last letter was dated from Cauteretz, D6p\ des Hautes Pyr6n6es, but from what he there intimated of return about this time, it would be foolish in you to hazard your good things in an epistle directed thither. The said Hallam or one of
^ No further information upon thb business has been preserved.
1830] THE SPANISH INSURRECTION. 53
his fellow-travellers, it should seem, wrote a letter to Tennant with full intention, I guess, of its getting further than Perpignan ; but Tennant a short time back informed me that he had received a commxmication from les Administrateurs de la Poste, adver- tising him of a letter which had taken up its abode at Perpignan on account of its not being paid to the coast. What news it contained " no one dreameth," or whether it was written previous or subsequent to my last receipts from the Continent. Kemble is said to be at Gibraltar. Trench either on the way thither or arrived, and Hallam expressed some apprehensions on the score of their safety, but I hope with you there is not much fear in the present posture of things. Thank you for sending Southey my sonnets, thank you for cheering my heart with the worthy man's good opinion, and thank you for your letter and address.
Before going further it may be as well to pick up the threads of the story of this Spanish insurrection. Torrijos the leader had hoped to restore such a measure of freedom as the Cortes had secured for Spain, in the Constitution which had been framed after the Peninsular War. This was the Constitution to which Ferdinand had sworn when he returned from his long captivity in Bayonne, but which he speedily renounced, dissolving the Cortes and restorr ing the Inquisition. In 1820, revolution having followed revolution, the Cortes met again, under protection of part of the army, and the Inquisition was abolished. This state of things did not last. In 1823 Ferdinand was, by help of the Due d'Angoulfeme, proclaimed abso- lute King. Again despotism prevailed. Many Liberals fled to England. Of these Carlyle gives a pathetic description as they were seen, chiefly about Huston Square and the new Church of St Pancras — " stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks," who had acknowledged General Torrijos as their chief. A fiery sympathy had been kindled in the hearts of many of the "Apostles " by this romantic band : some of whom had, after seven years' banishment, "got shipping as private passengers in one craft or the other; and, by degrees
54 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
or at once, arrived all at Gibraltar ; — Boyd (Sterling's cousin), one or two young democrats of Regent Street, the fifty picked Spaniards, and Torrijos \"
Among the Pyrenean revolutionists met by Arthur Hallam and my father the chief man was one Senor Ojeda, who informed them that he desired " couper la gorge i tous les cur&," then clapping his hand on his heart murmured " mais vous connaissez mon coeur " — " and a pretty black one it is," thought my father.
After the travellers had returned, a report reached Somersby that John Kemble, who had joined the insur- gents in the South, had been caught and was to be tried for his life. Away my father posted for miles in the early dawn to try and find someone of authority at Lincoln or elsewhere, who knew the Consul at Cadiz and would help him to save his friend. The report turned out to be untrue and Kemble came back safe and sound.
But on the last night of November, 1831, Torrijos and his gallant companions left Gibraltar in two small vessels ; the British Governor, on occasion of the fresh rising of General Mina against Spanish despotism, having intimated that Gibraltar must not shelter rebels against Spain.
They set sail for Malaga, were chased by Spanish guardships, and ran ashore at Fuengirola near Malaga. They barricaded themselves in a farm-house, were sur- rounded by vastly superior forces and compelled to sur- render.
All the fifty-six (Boyd among them) perished by military execution on the Esplanade of Malaga \
My father returned from the expedition in improved health. From this time forward the lonely Pyrenean
* Carlyle's/<;A« Sterlings p. 64 (cd. 1871). « Culylt's John Stirling^ p. 77.
1830] RETURN TO ENGLAND. 55
peaks, the mountains with " their streaks of virgin snow," like the Maladetta, mountain *' lawns and meadow- ledges midway down," and the "long brook falling thro* the clov'n ravine," were a continual source of inspiration; he had written part of "CEnone" in the valley of Cauteretz, His sojourn there was also com- memorated one and thirty years afterwards in " All along the Valley,"
He came home impressed with the " lightheartedness " of the French ; but, infinitely preferring the freer air of England," he writes: "Someone says that nothing strikes a traveller more on returning from the Continent than the look of an English country town. Houses not so big, nor such rows of them as abroad, but each man's house little or big distinct from one another, his own castle, built according to his own means and fancy, and so indicating the Englishman's free individual humour. I am struck on returning from France with the look of good sense in the London people V
Unpublished Poem, i828.
By a Brook.
Townsmen, or of the hamlet, young or old.
Whithersoever you may wander now.
Where'er you roam from, would you waste an hour,
Or sleep thro' one brief dream uppn the grass,
Pause here. The murmurs of the rivulet.
Rippling by cressy isles or bars of sand.
Are pleasant from the early Spring to when,
Full fields of barley shifting tearful lights
On growing spears, by fits the lady ash
With twinkling finger sweeps her yellow keys,
^Quoted from MS by £. F. G. (date of letter uncertain).
56 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
Unpubushed Poems, written (i 828-1 831) at
Cambridge.*
Anacaona.
[My father liked this poem but did not publish it, because the natural history and the rhymes did not satisfy him. He evidently chose words which sounded well, and gave a tropical air to the whole, and he did not then care, as in his later poems, for absolute accuracy.]
A dark Indian maiden,
Warbling in the bloom'd liana, Stepping lightly flower-laden.
By the crimson-eyed anana, Wantoning in orange groves
Naked, and dark-limb'd, and gay, Bathing in the slumbrous coves. In the cocoa-shadow'd coves.
Of sunbright Xaraguay, Who was so happy as Anacaona,
The beauty of Espagnola,
The golden flower of Hayti?
2
All her loving childhood
Breezes from the palm and canna Fann'd this queen of the green wildwood,
Lady of the green Savannah: All day long with laughing eyes.
Dancing by a palmy bay. In the wooded paradise. The cedar-wooded paradise
Of still Xaraguay: None were so happy as Anacaona,
The beauty of Espagnola,
The golden flower of Hayti!
* Copyright, 1897, by The M acmillan Company.
1830] "AN AC AON A." 57
3
In the purple island,
Crown'd with garlands of cinchona, Lady over wood and highland,
The Indian queen, Anacaona, Dancing on the blossomy plain
To a woodland melody: Playing with the scarlet crane \ The dragon-fly and scarlet crane,
Beneath the papao tree ! Happy, happy was Anacaona,
The beauty of Espagnola,
The golden flower of Hayti!
4 The white man's white sail, bringing
To happy Hayti the new-comer, Over the dark sea-marge springing,
Floated in the silent summer: Then she brought the guava fruit,
With her maidens to the bay; She gave them the yuccaroot, Maizebread and the yuccaroot,
Of sweet Xaraguay: Happy, happy Anacaona,
The beauty of Espagnola,
The golden flower of Hayti!
5 Naked, without fear, moving
To her Areyto's mellow ditty. Waving a palm branch, wondering, loving,
Carolling " Happy, happy Hayti ! " She gave the white men welcome all.
With her damsels by the bay;
^ Perhaps the scarlet ibis, guava rubray not now known to visit Hayti.
58 CAMBRIDGE. [l82S-
For they were fair-faced and tall, They were more fair-faced and tall,
Than the men of Xaraguay, And they smiled on Anacaona,
The beauty of Espagnola,
The golden flower of Hayti!
Following her wild carol
She led them down the pleasant places, For they were kingly in apparel.
Loftily stepping with fair faces. But never more upon the shore
Dancing at the break of day. In the deep wood no more, — By the deep sea no more, —
No more in Xaraguay Wander'd happy Anacaona,
The beauty of Espagnola,
The golden flower of Hayti!
The Lark.
Full light aloft doth the laverock spring
From under the deep, sweet corn. And chants in the golden wakening
Athwart the bloomy mom. What aileth thee, O bird divine.
That thou singest with main and with might? Is thy mad brain drunk with the merry, red wine,
At the very break of light? It is not good to drink strong wine
Ere the day be well-nigh done; But thou hast drunk of the merry, sweet wine.
At the rising of the sun.
1830^ OTHER UNPUBLISHED VERSES. 59
Some verses of " Sir Launcelot and Queen Guine- vere" were handed about at Cambridge among my father's contemporaries. The following unpublished lines were among them, and kept by Edward Fitzgerald :
Life of the Life within my blood,
Light of the Light within mine eyes, The May begins to breathe and bud,
And softly blow the balmy skies; Bathe with me in the fiery flood.
And mingle kisses, tears, and sighs, Life of the Life within my blood,
Light of the Light within mine eyes.
Life.
Why suflFer human life so soon eclipse? For I could burst into a psalm of praise. Seeing the heart so wondrous in her ways, £*en scorn looks beautiful on human lips I Would I could pile fresh life on life, and dull The sharp desire of knowledge still with knowing! Art, Science, Nature, everything is full. As my own soul is full, to overflowing — Millions of forms, and hues, and shades, that give The difference of all things to the sense. And all the likeness in the difference. I thank thee, God, that thou hast made me live: I reck not for the sorrow or the strife: One only joy I know, the joy of life.
60 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
To Poesy.
O God, make this age great that we may be As giants in Thy praise ! and raise up Mind,
Whose trumpet-tongued, aerial melody May blow alarum loud to every wind, And startle the dull ears of. human kind!
Methinks I see the world's renewed youth A long day's dawn, when Poesy shall bind
Falsehood beneath the altar of great Truth:
The clouds are sunder'd toward the moming-rise; Slumber not now, gird up thy loins for fight.
And get thee forth to conquer. I, even I,
Am large in hope that these expectant eyes
Shall drink the fulness of thy victory,
Tho' thou art all unconscious of thy Might.
To—.
Thou may'st remember what I said
When thine own spirit was at strife
With thine own spirit. " From the tomb
And charnel-place of purpose dead.
Thro' spiritual dark we come
Into the light of spiritual* life."
God walk'd the waters of thy soul.
And still'd them. When from change to change.
Led silently by power divine.
Thy thought did scale a purer range
Of prospect up to self-control.
My joy was ohly less than thine.
1830] "THE HESPERIDES/' 6 1
The Hesperides!^
[Published and suppressed by my father, and republished by me here (with accents written by him) in consequence of a talk that I had with him, in which he regretted that he had done away with it from among his "Juvenilia."]
Hesperus and his daughters three
That sing about the golden tree. Comus.
The North wind falFn, in the new-starr€d night
Zidonian Hanno, wandering beyond
The hoary promontory of Solo'e,
Past Thymiaterion in calmed bays
Between the southern and the western Horn,
Heard neither warbling of the nightingale,
Nor melody of the Libyan Lotus-flute
Blown seaward from the shore; but from a slope
That ran bloom-bright into the Atlantic blue.
Beneath a highland leaning down a weight
Of cliffs, and zoned below with cedar-shade.
Came voices like the voices in a dream
Continuous; till he reach'd the outer sea: —
Song of the Three Sisters.
I
The Golden Apple, the Golden Apple, the hallow'd
fruit, Guard it well, guard it warily. Singing airily.
Standing about the charmed root. Round about all is mute, As the snowfield on the mountain-peaks. As the sandfield at the mountain-foot. Crocodiles in briny creeks Sleep and stir not: all is mute.
* Copyright, 1897, by The Macmillan Company.
62 CAMBRIDGE. [1828-
If ye sing not, if ye make false measure,
We shall lose eternal pleasure,
Worth eternal want of rest.
Laugh not loudly: watch the treasure
Of the wisdom of the West.
In a corner wisdom whispers. Five and three
(Let it not be preach'd abroad) make an awful mystery ;
For the blossom unto threefold music bloweth;
Evermore it is born anew,
And the sap to threefold music floweth.
From the root.
Drawn in the dark.
Up to the fruit.
Creeping under the fragrant bark,
Liquid gdld, hdneysweet thrd and thrrf.
{siow fnavcment)
Keen-eyed Sisters, singing airily.
Looking warily
Every way.
Guard the apple night and day.
Lest one from the East come and take it away.
II
Father Hesper, Father Hesper, Watch, watch, ever
and aye. Looking under silver hair with a silver eye. Father, twinkle not thy stedfast sight: Kingdoms lapse, and climates change, and races die ; Honour comes with mystery; Hoarded wisdom brings delight. Number, tell them over, and number How many the mystic fruit-tree holds, Lest the red-comb'd dragon slumber Roird together in purple folds.
18ao] SONG OF THE THREE SISTERS. 63
Look to him, father, lest he wink, and the golden
apple be stol'n away. For his ancient heart is drunk with overwatchings
night and day Round about the hallow'd fruit-tree curl'd — Sing awiy, sing aloud evermdre in the wind without
st(5p, {Anapast)
Lest his sealed eyelid drop, For he is older than the world. If hi waken, we waken. Rapidly levelling eager eyes. If hi sleep, we sleep. Dropping the eyelid over our eyes. If the golden apple be taken The world will be overwise. Five links, a golden chain are we, Hesper, the Dragon, and Sisters three Bound about the golden tree.
Ill
Father Hesper, Father Hesper, Watch, watch, night
and day. Lest the old wound of the world be healed. The glory unsealed. The golden apple stol'n away. And the ancient secret revealed. Look from West to East along: Father, old Himala weakens, Caucasus is bold and strong. Wandering waters unto wandering waters call; Let them clash together, foam and fall. Out of watchings, out of wiles. Comes the bliss of secret smiles. All things are not told to all.
64 CAMBRIDGE. [l828-
Half-round the mantling night is drawn.
Purplefring^d with even and dawn
Hesper hateth Phosphor, evening hateth morn.
IV
Every flower and every fruit the redolent breath Of the warm seawind ripeneth,
Arching the billow in his sleep: But the land-wind wandereth, Broken by the highland steep, Two streams upon the violet deep. For the Western Sun, and the Western Star, And the low west-wind, breathing afar. The end of day and beginning of night. Keep the apple Holy and Bright; Holy and Bright, round and full, bright and blest, Mellow'd in a land of rest: Watch it warily night and day; All good things are in the West. Till mid-noon the cool East light Is shut out by the round of the tall hill brow, But, when the full-faced Sunset yellowly Stays on the flowerful arch of the bough. The luscious fruitage clustereth mellowly,
Golden-kerneird, Golden-cored, Sunset-ripen'd above on the tree. The world is wasted with fire and sword, But the Apple of gold hangs over the Sea! Five links — a Golden chain are we — Hesper, the Dragon, and Sisters three,
Daughters three. Round about. All round about The gnarl'd bole of the charmed tree.
1830] "LASTING SORROW." 65
The Golden Apple, The Golden Apple, The hallow'd fruit,
Guard it well,
Guard it warily,
Watch it warily.
Singing airily, Standing about the charmed root
Lasting Sorrow.
(Republished from Friendship's Offering — an album published by
Smith and Elder 1832.)
Me my own Fate to lasting sorrow doometh : Thy woes are birds of passage, transitory : Thy spirit, circled with a living glory, In summer still a summer joy resumeth. Alone my hopeless melancholy gloometh. Like a lone cypress, thro' the twilight hoary, From an old garden where no flower bloometh. One cypress on an inland promontory ; But yet my lonely spirit follows thine. As round the rolling earth night follows day ; But yet thy lights on my horizon shine Into my night, when thou art far away; I am so dark, alas I and thou so bright. When we two meet there's never perfect light.
Another sonnet, " There are three things which fill my heart with sighs," he contributed (1832) to the Yorkshire Literary Annual.
T. L c
CHAPTER III.
CAMBRIDGE, SOMERSBY AND ARTHUR HALLAM.
1830-31. To Alfred Tennyson {at Somersby) {unpublished).
Those Gothic windows are before me now, Which long have shone dim-lighted in my mind; That slope of softest green, the brook below, Old musty stalls, and tedded hay behind —
All have I seen; and simple tho^ they be, A mighty awe steals with them on my heart, For they have grown and lasted as a part Of thy dear self, up-building thine and thee :
From yon tall fir, weathering the April rain, Came influence rare, that deepened into song. Beauty lurked for thee in the long gray fields. By tufted knolls, and, Alfred, made thee strong ! Hence are the weapons which thy spirit wields, Musical thoughts of unexampled strain. A. H. H.
As Sterling had been deeply moved " by the opinions and feelings which pervaded the age," and had instituted a crusade against the cold selfishness of the time ; so the narrowness and dryness of the ordinary course of study at Cambridge, the lethargy there, and absence of any teaching that grappled with the ideas of the age and stimulated and guided thought on the subjects of deepest human interest, had stirred my father to wraths He cried aloud for some " soldier-priest, no sabbath-drawler of old saws," to set the world right. But however
^Macaulay had written of the Cambridge of his day: ''We see men of four and five-and-twenty, loaded with academical honours and rewards — scholarships, fellowships, whole cabinets of medals, whole shelves of prize-books, enter into life with their education still to begin; un- acquainted with the first principles of the laws under which they live,
66
1880] RELATIONS WITH CAMBRIDGE. 67
gloomy his own view and that of his contemporaries was then as to the present, my father clearly saw the " Day-beam, New-risen o'er awaken'd Albion." Indeed now, as always, he was one of those " on the look-out for every new idea, and for every old idea with a new application, which may tend to meet the growing requirements of society"; one of those who are "like men standing on a watch-tower, to whom others apply and say, not *What of the night?' but 'What of the morning and of the coming day^?'"
At the request of Aubrey de Vere, he consented that the following denunciatory lines, written in his undergraduate days, should be published among my notes.
Lines on Cambridge of 1830.
Therefore your Halls, your ancient Colleges, Your portals statued with old kings and queens. Your gardens, myriad-volumed libraries, Wax-lighted chapels, and rich carven screens. Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans, Shall not avail you, when the Day-beam sports New-risen o'er awaken'd Albion. No! Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow Melodious thunders thro' your vacant courts At noon and eve, because your manner sorts Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart. Because the lips of little children preach Against you, you that do profess to teach And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.
In after years a great change came over Cambridge,
unacquainted with the very rudiments of moral and political science.** And when Whewell in 1838 was elected to the chair of Moral Philosophy, he began his introductory address by elaborately justifying the innovation of delivering public lectures on the subject committed to his charge.
^ Speech of the Duke of Argyll in the House of Lords, Aug. 13th, 1894.
68 CAMBRIDGE, SOMERSBY AND ARTHUR HALLAM. [l830
and he was sorry that he had spoken so bitterly, for he always looked back with affection to those " dawn-golden times " passed with his friends at Trinity. He honoured the University for the way it had adapted itself to modem requirements ; and he especially approved of the University Extension movement, for spreading higher education throughout local centres in Great Britain. Every vacation after his marriage University men visited him, so that he kept level with such movements.
What impressed him most, when he went to Cam- bridge in 1872, was the change in the relations be- tween don and undergraduate. While he was keeping his terms (1828-1831) there was "a great gulf fixed" between the teacher and the taught \ but in 1872 he found a constant personal intercourse and interchange of ideas between them. And, as the "living word" is to each man more than the mere lecture-room exposition, this change, he thought, could not fail to have the best influence on the enlargement of the views, sympathies and aspirations of the generations to come.
A letter from Blakesley indicates an intellectual attitude somewhat similar to my father's in relation to the prevailing habits of thought in Cambridge and in
society at large.
Blackheath, 1830. Dear Tennyson,
The present race of monstrous opinions and feelings which pervade the age require the arm of a strong Iconoclast. A volume of poetry written in a proper spirit, a spirit like that jwhich a vigorous mind indues by the study of Wordsworth and /Shelley, would be, at the present juncture, the greatest benefit xhe world could receive. And more benefit would accrue from it than from all the exertions of the Jeremy Benthamites and Millians, if they were to continue for ever and a day. I have seen Sterling two or three times since I have been in these parts, and had some conversation with him.
1 He said to Dr BuUer, ^ There was a want of love in Cambridge then.^^
1830] LETTER FROM J. W. BLAKESLEY. 69
Sterling, and all of his class, who have been hawked at by the mousing owls of Cambridge, suffer from the narrow-minded- ness of criticism.-^ He saw the abuses of the present system of things, which is upheld by the strong hand of power and custom, and he attacked them accordingly. For this conduct he was dubbed a radical. He soon saw that the reforms proposed by that party were totally inadequate to the end which they proposed : that if carried to their fullest effect they would only remove the symptoms and not the cause of evil ; that this cause was the selfish spirit which pervades the whole frame of society at present, and that to counterbalance the effects the cause of them must be removed. This end, he at first probably thought with^Sllfillfiy> might be effected by lopping off those institutions in which that selfish spirit exhibits itself, without any more effort. He afterwards saw, with Wordsworth, that this was not the true method ; but that we must implant another principle with which selfishness cannot co-exist, and trust that this plant as it grows up will absorb the nourishment of the weed, in which case those wickednesses and miseries, which are only the forms in which the latter developes itself, will of their own accord die away, as soon as their principle of vegetation is withered and dried up.
Hallam has gone back to Cambridge. He was not well while he was in London ; moreover, he was submitting himself to the influences of the outer world more than (I think) a man of his genius ought to do.
I shall be in Cambridge, God willing (which, considering the depth of the snow is not quite clear), to-morrow evening. I hope soon to see you there.
Believe me your affectionate friend,
J. W. Blakesley.
On October 4th, 1830, Arthur Hallam wrote from Forest House, Leyton, Essex:
I am sorry, dear Alfred, that I have left your note so long unanswered ; but I don't doubt you have found already that to return to one's native land is to throw oneself into the jaws of all kinds of importunate people, from creditors upwards or down- wards, who leave one no time for pleasant things. Yet this
70 CAMBRIDGE, SOMERSBY AND ARTHUR HALLAM. [188O
excuse lies arrantly, I discover upon second thoughts. I am living here in a very pleasant place, an old country mansion, in the depths of the Forest, with cedars in the garden, the seed of which is vouched to have been brought from Lebanon, and a billiard-table within doors, by dint of which I demolish time pretty well. I have been studious too, partly after my fashion, and partly after my father's ; i.e. I read six books of Herodotus with him, and I take occasional plunges into David Hartley, and Buhle's Philosophie Modeme for my own gratification. I cannot find that my adventures have produced quite the favourable impression on my father's mind that his letter gave me to expect. I don't mean that he blames me at all; but his old notions about the University begin to revive, and he does not y/ seem quite to comprehend, that after helping to revolutionize kingdoms, one is still less inclined than before to trouble one's head about scholarships, degree and such gear. Sometimes I sigh to be again in the ferment of minds, and stir of events which is now the portion of other coimtries. I wish I could be useful ; but to be a fly on that great wheel would be something. Spanish affairs, you will have seen by the papers, go on slowly : not therefore, I trust, less surely; but I wish something was done. Sterling has had little direct news for a while, and Perina never wrote to me. Sterling has been unwell, and is going to be married. I am glad he does not go out of the Apostolic family, for his lady is to be Susan Barton, of whom you may often have heard Blakesley rave. I had a letter from Spedding the other day, full of pleasant scoffs. I found one on my return from Leighton, dated two months ago, and extolling your book above sun, moon and stars: I have written to him, but as he has not answered, he has probably quitted Upfield Lodge. I cannot make out that you have been reviewed anywhere, but I have seen no magazines, and a letter from Garden, also of very old date, gives hope of Blackwood, Effingham of course I shun, as I would " whipping to death, pressing and hanging." Moxon very civilly sent me two copies of Lamb's Album verses, one for you ; the book is weak as water. What think you of Belgium ? The opinion of everybody here seems against them ; yet I cannot well conceive their present resolution, and increasing unanimity, unless the grounds of their aversion to the Dutch were stronger than it is the fashion to represent them. At all events, now blood has
183l] LIKELIHOOD OF EUROPEAN WAR. 7 1
flowed in torrents, all union is rendered impracticable. The chances of a general war in Europe are great; the iniquitous prudence of the Allied Wolves, who struck the Lion down, has guaranteed the possession of Belgium to the Dutch crown, and should the insurgents, as is very likely, declare they never can submit to the government of a Thing who has made war upon them, the inevitable consequence will be that the Prussians will interfere to preserve the sanctity of the guarantee, and the French to maintain the principle, that the allegiance of a people depends on its consent, not on the autocratic transfer of another power. 'Twas a very pretty little revolution in Saxony, and a respectable one at Brunswick. I am surprised you have not heard of Frederick ; have you not written to the Hdtel de Lille ? You really ought, for he may be in distress, and Temple- ton has very likely left Paris. I beg your pardon for this stupid note, and rest in expectation of your promised letter, which I hope will explain your intentions for the future, and the details of things as they are at Somersby. Remember me most kindly to your mother and sisters, and tell Charles to write.
Affectionately yours, A. H. H.
It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father to Arthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthur's death: a great loss, as these par- ticular letters probably revealed his inner self more truly than anything outside his poems.
In February 183 1 my father left Cambridge, for my grandfather was somewhat ailing and wished that he should return to help his mother.
On the night of leaving he gave a supper in his rooms, Corpus Buildings, and after supper he and his friends all danced a quadrille. As he drove away in the coach his last sight in Trumpington Street was "Thomp- son's handsome face under the light of a street lamp."
After he had gone down, the Cambridge friends for- warded him his Alfieri, which one of them had borrowed from him and for which he had been making constant de- mands, and they also told him of the poet Wordsworth's
72 CAMBRIDGE, SOMERSBY AND ARTHUR HALLAM. [l831
visit to Trinity. They told how Spedding gave him , coffee in his rooms ; how Wordsworth was in good talk- \ ing mood but furiously alarmist, nothing but revolutions, reigns of terror ; how he had said he wished that Cole- ridge had not written the second part of " Christabel " because this required the tale to be finished, and asserted that the conclusion of Part I., " It was a lovely sight to see," was too much laboured : how he defended " Passive Obedience " by quoting Scripture. Upon the whole, although he " said nothing very profound^ or original," yet the young men enjoyed his talk till one o'clock in the morning; he also was pleased with his hearers.
My father's comment on such criticism about a poet whom he loved was : " How can you expect a great man to say anything * very profound ' when he knows it is expected of him ? "
On a Wednesday of this March, shortly after ii o'clock in the morning, my grandfather was found leaning back in his study chair, having passed away peacefully —
Once thro' mine own doors Death did pass, One went, who never hath retum'd. He will not smile — not speak to me Once more.
After Arthur Hallam's death these lines were written in " In Memoriam," referring to the double loss of his father and of his friend :
As down the garden-walks I move. Two spirits of a diverse love Contend for loving masterdom.
My father told me that within a week after his father's death he slept in the dead man's bed, earnestly desiring
^ Wordsworth, according to Milnes, heard Hallam deliver his Declama- tion in Trinity College Chapel. ''It was splendid,^^ he writes, ''to see the poet Wordsworth^s £ace kindle as Hallam proceeded with it.^
188l] DEATH OF MY GRANDFATHER. 73
to see his ghost, but no ghost came. "You see," he said, "ghosts do not generally come to imaginative jeople." In a letter to his friend John Frere, my mole Charles describes what happened:
SoMERSBY, March 2$rd, 1831.
• •••••
John, a melancholy change has taken place in our house sinc^ I saw you last. My poor father, all his life a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief y has gone to " that bourne from whence no traveller returns." After an illness of about a month's continuance, he died last Wednesday at eleven o'clock in the day. He suffered little, and after death his countenance, which was strikingly lofty and peaceful, was I trust an image of the condition of his soul, which on earth was daily racked by bitter fancies, and tossed about by strong troubles. We are not certain whether we shall be permitted to remain much longer in this place. We must abide the pleasure of Robinson, the next Incumbent, &c. &c.
If...I pay him a rent by which he will be a gainer, I think we are likely to be less under obligations to him than he to us. But as my father's revenues are now sequestrated we are left entirely at the will of my grandfather, who may have a house of his own to put us into.
Charles Tennyson (d'Eyncourt) \ Dr Tennyson's brother, also writes to the co-trustee of my grandfather's property, Mr Rawnsley of Halton :
This morning's post brought me the afflicting news from Somersby. You will guess my feelings, for you know that I valued my dear brother for his thousand admirable qualities of
^Thc Right Hon. Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt represented in Parliament successively Grimsby, Bletchingley, Stamford, and Lambeth. On his death in 1861, he was succeeded by his son George Hilde3rard T. d'Eyncourt, who died in 1871. The Tennyson estates then passed to his brother, Admiral Edwin Tennyson d'Ejmcourt, C.B., who had served with distinction in China, and in the Gulf of Finland during the Crimean War. Under an arrangement made with the Admiral, Edmund d'Eyncourt, son of Louis T. d'Eyncourt (long known as Senior Metropolitan Magistrate), now holds the property.
74 CAMBRIDGE, SOMERSBY AND ARTHUR HALLAM. [l831
heart, which would have contributed to his own happiness anc that of those around him if he had not given way to failings arising out of a nervous temperament. I knew him to te excellent in intention, to be naturally full of worth and goodness, and I respected and loved him. I believe he also depended on my fraternal feelings towards him, and I will, as far as I can, endeavour to justify his good opinion of me. I transmit to you his will and a codicil....! was unable to get down to Somersby, my official business requiring my presence in town. I vould however have broken through all, if I could have been of use or comfort to my poor brother's widow.
From Arthur Hallam to Emily Tennyson,
1831.
I cannot help thinking that if the name of Tennyson should pass from that little region, which all your Kfe long has been to you home, that blessed little region, " bosomed in a kindlier air. Than the outer realm of care And dole," the very fields and lanes will feel a sorrow, as if part of their appointed being had been reft from them. Yet, after all, a consecration has come upon them from the dwellers at Somersby, which, I think, is not of the things that fail. Many years perhaps, or shall I say many ages, after we all have been laid in dust, young lovers of the beautiful and the true may seek in faithful pilgrimage the spot where Alfred's mind was moulded in silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of nature. Legends will perhaps be attached to the places that are near it. Some Mariana, it will be said, lived wretched and alone in a dreary house on the top of the opposite hill. Some Isabel may with more truth be sought nearer yet. The belfry, in which the white owl sat " warming his five wits," will be shown, for six- pence, to such travellers as have lost their own. Critic after critic will track the wanderings of the brook, or mark the groupings of elm and poplar, in order to verify the " Ode to Memory " in its minutest particulars. I send down, along with this note, some numbers of the Tatler, containing a review of Alfred and Charles by Leigh Hunt. You will be amused with the odd style of his observations, and the frank familiarity with which he calls them by their Christian names, just as if he had supped with them a hundred times. His general remarks are
183l] HALLAM AND EMILY TENNYSON. 75
nonsensical enough, but being a poet he has a keen eye for true beauty, and the judgments of his taste are worth having. Charles will be proud of this review because it is the first notice which the Press (our new despot, the Kehama, under whom the world now groans, already nearly almighty and omnipresent, but, alas ! as far as ever from all-wise) has deigned to take of his " humble plot of ground." But he has had better suflFrages : voices have come to him from the Lakes, and the old man of Highgate has rejoiced over him^ I am looking forward with eagerness to seeing Charles ; would that Alfred were with him ! but that will not be, and perhaps ought not to be ; '' the days are awa " that we have seen.
The upshot of the various transactions as to Somersby was, that the new Incumbent was willing that the Tennysons should live on at the Rectory, where they remained till 1837.
Arthur Hallam had been attached to my aunt Emily since 1829. After the first year, when Mr Hallam thought it desirable that the lovers should be separated for a time, he stayed at Somersby as often as he could spare leisure from his work ; and whenever he came, he cheered all with his " bright, angelic spirit and his gentle, chivalrous manner*."
" I am," wrote Hallam to Trench, " now at Somersby, not only as the friend of Alfred Tennyson, but as the lover of his sister. An attachment on my part of nearly two years' standing and a mutual engagement of one year are, I fervently hope, only the commencement of a
1 S. T. Coleridge.
'Witch-elms that counterchange the floor Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright ; And thou, with all thy breadth and height Of foliage, towering sycamore ;
H9W often, hither wandering down,
My Arthur found your shadows fisdr.
And shook to all the liberal air The dust and din and steam of town.
76 CAMBRIDGE, SOMERSBY AND ARTHUR HALLAM. [l831
union which circumstances may not impair, and the grave itself may not conclude."
My aunt Emily had eyes " with depths on depths," and " a profile like that on a coin," " testa Romana," as an old Italian said of her. All the Tennyson sons and daughters except Frederick had the colouring of Italy or the south of France with dark eyes and hair. This foreign colouring may possibly have been derived from a Huguenot ancestor, a relation of Madame de Maintenon. On the Continent my father was never taken for an Englishman, and even in Ireland in 1848, when he was at Valentia, an Irishman rose up from among the fern and heather, and said, " From France, your honour ? " thinking, as he confessed, that he was a Frenchman come to head a revolution.
While Hallam was at Somersby, after the morning's work the Tennysons and he would generally go for long walks together beyond the " bounding hill." Not only was my father fond of walking, but of *' putting the stone " and other athletic feats. Mrs Lloyd of Louth writes: " In proof of his strong muscular power, when showing us a little pet pony on the lawn at Somersby one day he surprised us by taking it up and carrying it." Brook- field remarked : " It is not fair, Alfred, that you should be Hercules as well as Apollo." Fitzgerald notes: " Alfred could hurl the crowbar further than any of the neighbouring clowns, whose humours, as well as those of their betters, knight, squire, landlord and lieutenant, he took quiet note of, like Chaucer himself." Yet as he wandered over the wold, or by the brook, he often seemed to be in dreamland, so that one who often saw him then called him "a mysterious being, seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of intercourse with the spirit-world not granted to others."
In the evening he lived much in his attic den, but now and then came down and listened to the singing
183l] LIFE AT SOMERSBY. 77
and playing of his sisters. He had a love for the simple style of Mozart, and for our own national airs and ballads, and played himself a little on the flute, but only " cared for complicated music as suggesting echoes of winds and waves." The sisters were all very musical, my aunt Mary playing the harp and accompanying the brothers and sisters who sang. Fitzgerald speaks of music in College days, and says :
A. T. was not thought to have an ear for music; I re- member little of his execution in the line except humming over "the weary pund o' tow," which was more because of the weary moral, I think, than for any music's sake. Carlyle once said, " The man must have music dormant in him, revealing itself in versed I remember A. T.*s speaking of Haydn's " Chaos," which he had heard at some Oratorio. He said, " The violins spoke of lights Carlyle, who was apt to look on poetry as a waste of talents which ought to be employed in other heroic work, took at once to A. T.: among other signs of the man, remarking his voice, " like the sound of a pinewood," he said.
In past years many friends of Somersby days have told me of the exceeding consideration and love which my father showed his mother, and how much they were struck by the young man's tender and defer- ential manner towards her, and how he might often be found in her room reading aloud, with his flexible voice, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Spenser and Campbell's patriotic ballads. When Arthur Hallam was with them, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto were the favourite poets : and it was he who taught my aunt Emily Italian, and made her a proficient scholar.
78 CAMBRIDGE, SOMERSBY AND ARTHUR HALLAM. [l831
Arthur Hallam to Emily Tennyson.
Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome, Ringing with echoes of Italian song ; Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong,
And all the pleasant place is like a home :
Hark I on the right, with full piano tone. Old Dante's voice encircles all the air: Hark yet again I like flute tones mingling rare
Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan.
Pass thou the lintel freely ; without fear Feast on the music. I do better know thee Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me
Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear That element whence thou must draw thy life, An English maiden and an English wife.
CHAPTER IV.
ARTHUR HALLAM.
1831-1833.
Thy leaf has perishM in the green, Andy while we breathe beneath the sun. The world which credits what is done
Is cold to all that might have been.
So here shall silence guard thy £une;
But somewhere, out of human view.
Whatever thy hands are set to do Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.
In the spring of 1831 my father was much distressed about the condition of his eyes and feared that he was going to lose his sight, " a sad thing to barter the uni- versal light even for the power of * Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.' " He took to a milk diet for some months, which apparently " did good." At all events his eyesight was strong enough to allow him to study Don Quixote in the original. He also records that one night he " saw the moonlight reflected in a nightingale's eye, as she was singing in the hedgerow ^" He adds that her voice vibrated with such passion that he wrote of
The leaves That tremble round the nightingale
^ Owing to hb extreme short-sight he could see objects at a short distance better than anyone : and at a long distance with his eye-glass or
79
8o ARTHUR HALLAM. [l831
in " The Gardener's Daughter." Hallam told him at this time that " The nightingale with long and low preamble," in the sonnet which I give, was "worth an estate in Golconda."
Check every outflash, every ruder sally
Of thought and speech, speak low, and give up wholly
Thy spirit to mild-minded Melancholy :
This is the place. Thro' yonder poplar alley,
Below, the blue green river windeth slowly.
But in the middle of the sombre valley,
The crisped waters whisper musically,
And all the haunted place is dark and holy.
The nightingale, with long and low preamble.
Warbled from yonder knoll of solemn larches.
And in and out the woodbine's flowery arches
The summer midges wove their wanton gambol,
And all the white-stemm'd pinewood slept above,
When in this valley first I told my love.
My father contributed " Anacreontics," " No More \" and " A Fragment," to a literary annual The Gem ; and Moxon, who had some sparks of poetry in him, and had come into possession of the Englishman's Magazine^ wished to start with a "flash number," and asked Hallam to persuade my father to forward him a poem which would appear along with contributions from Wordsworth, Southey, and Charles Lamb. Hallam urged him (July 15th, 1831) to send "The Sisters,"
spectacles he could see as far as any long-sighted person. At this time he went to see Brodie for his eyes, and began to talk so learnedly about them, that Brodie raised his hand saying: *<Wait; remember I never stt medical students without a fee.^^ His hearing was extraordinarily keen, and this he held to be a compensation for his short-sight: he ''could hear the shriek of a bat,^' which he said was the test of a fine ear.
^''No More^ is written out in Arthur Hallam^s handwriting in a common-place book belonging to Archdeacon Allen, and is dated by Arthur Hallam 1826. Although my £sither considered the poem crude, it is re- markable for a boy of seventeen.
183l] "AS PISGAH TO CANAAN." 8 1
or " Rosalind," or the " Southern Mariana," and begged him not to disdain a mode of publication which Schiller and Groethe chose for their best compositions. He pointed out that the fugitive pieces might form part of a volume hereafter.
Hallam was at Hastings "listening all day to the song of the larks on the cliffs," and reading Destiny and Inheritance. He had no answer from Alfred, or any of his brothers, so wrote again :
Hastings, July 2(ithy 1831.
I have been expecting for some days an answer to my letter about Moxon; but I shall not delay any longer my reply to your last, and before this is sent off yours may come. I, whose imag^ation is to yours as Pisgah to Canaan, the point of distant prospect to the place of actual possession, am not without some knowledge and experience of your passion for the past. Ta this community of feeling between us, I probably owe your inestimable friendship, and those blessed hopes which you have been the indirect occasion of awakening. But what with you is universal and all-powerful, absorbing your whole existence, communicating to you that energy which is so glorious, in me is checked and counteracted by many other impulses, tending to deaden the influence of the senses which were already less vivacious by nature. When I say the senses, I meaa those employed in the processes of imagination, viz. sight and heariHg. You say pathetically, " Alas for me ! I have more, of the Beautiful than the Good ! '* Remember to your comfort, that God has given you to see the difference. Many a poet has gone on blindly in his artist pride. I am very glad you have been reading Erskine [of Linlathen]. No books have done me so much good as his, and I always thought you would like them if they came in your way. His doctrine may not be the truth, but it may contain it still, and this is my own view of the case. You perhaps will be angry when I tell you that I sent your sonnet about the "Sombre Valley" to Moxon \ who is charmed with it, and has printed it off. I confess this is a breach of trust on my part, but I hope for your forgiveness...
A., xi. rl. ^ Published in the Englishman's Maganne for August.
T. L 6
82 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l831
The two friends, after a tour taken by Hallam in Devon, Cornwall and Yorkshire, met at Sheffield to talk over literary plans for the future. Hallam wrote that he was "in the humbler station of critic," while "Alfred is brimful of subjects and artist thoughts." The "Apostles" and their little band of Cambridge friends expressed themselves warmly as to Hallam's article on the Poems^ chiefly Lyrical. After his holiday Hallam returned to his reading of law, and enjoyed "the old fellow Blackstone," culling for Alfred poetic words like "forestal." "The Dream of Fair Women," Hallam was of opinion, should be published soon, for it would establish the poet at once in general reputation. The friends interchanged thoughts on the political state of the world and on Ireland especially, which is "the most volcanic point." They had grave arguments about the Church, and were exercised about the St Simonians, whose opinions on many points "resembled those of Shelley, although they were much more practical." Miss JAusten's novels were read and notes compared. My father preferred Emma and Persuasion^ and Hallam wrote, ''Emma is my first love, and I intend to be constant. The edge of this constancy will soon be tried, for I am promised the reading of Pride and Prejudice''
My father meets Fanny Kemble, whom he holds "supreme in Juliet," and she speaks of him as having "the grandest head of any man whom she has clapt eyes on." Adelaide Kemble copies out " The Sisters," "raving about it at intervals in the most Siddonian tone," and Fanny has set the ballad to music; "she inclines however to think it too painful, and to wish such things should not be written." Her " enthusiasm is high" over some of the manuscript poems in the forthcoming 1832 volume, especially "The Lady of Shalott."
1832] FANNY KEMBLE. 83
Her own play, Francis /., runs for several nights (March 1832). "It is a remarkable production for seventeen; the language is very pure, free, elegant English and strictly dramatic. There is none of that verbiage which is called mere poetry in it. She must have nourished her childhood with the strong wine of our old drama " : so writes Hallam, who was more conversant with that old drama than any of his Cambridge contemporaries.
The Hunchback is then given, and Hallam writes that " The scene in the second Act, where Fanny Kemble plays fine lady, was excellent, but the tragic parts yet finer: for instance where CliflFord comes in as Secretary, and afterwards where she expostulates with Master Walter. Her * CliflFord, why don't you speak to me ? ' and * CliflFord, is it you ? ' and her ' Do it,' with all the accompanying speech, I shall never forget."
Hallam and my father in their rambles through London, and in their smokes in Hallam's den at the top of the house in the " long unlovely street," touched on all imaginable topics. Hallam was busy writing essays on modern authors; and these and my father's 1832 volume were frequent subjects of discussion. The unsettled condition of the country and the misery of the poorer class weighed upon them. It seemed difficult to young men, starting in life, to know how to remedy these evils, but they determined not to lose hold of the Real in seeking the Ideal. Hallam writes : " Where the ideas of time and sorrow are not, and sway not the soul with power, there is no true knowledge in Poetry or Philoso- phy."
On my father's return to Somersby, the correspond- ence recommenced. Hallam desires the publication of " The Lover's Tale," for there are " magnificent passages in that poem. The present casket, faulty as it is, is yet the only one in which the precious gems contained therein
84 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l832
can be preserved." The author thinks it too diffuse and will not publish. Hallam answers that, since his is " the only printed copy of the * Lover's Tale/ he shall make a fortune by lending it out at five shillings a head." One day he reads " CEnone " to his father, who " seems to like Juno's speech, but is called away in the middle of Venus'," so the friends do not obtain the great man's criticism.
Meanwhile the colloquial critic of Blackwood^ ** Chris- topher North," had delivered his judgment on Poems, chiefly Lyrical in a comically aggressive though not wholly unfriendly articled
The following two letters were written by Arthur Hallam about this review, and the poems which were to appear in the volume of 1832:
[ Undated.']
Professor Wilson has thought fit to have a laugh at you and
your critics, amongst whom so humble a thing as myself, has
not, as you will perceive, escaped. I suppose one ought to feel
very savage at being attacked, but somehow I feel much more
amused. He means well I take it, and as he has extracted
nearly your whole book, and has in his soberer mood spoken in
terms as high as I could have used myself of some of your best
poems, I think the review will assist rather than hinder the
march of your reputation. They little know the while that you
despise the false parts of your volume quite as vehemently
as your censors can, and with purer zeal, because with better
knowledge.
April lothf 1832.
I don't know that you ought to publish this spring, but I shall never be easy or secure about your MSS until I see them f aurly out of your control. The Ballad of " The Sisters " was very popular at Cambridge. Indeed it is very perfect. Monteith showed his ignorance by wishing the murdering lady
1 For example in the criticism of the song entiUed " The Owl," he says, ''Alfred is as an owl: all that he wants is to be shot, stuffed and stuck into a glass case, to be made immortal in a museum.'" {Blackwood^s Mag, Vol. XXXI.)
1882] LETTERS FROM HALLAM AND SPEDDING. 85
to have been originally the rival of the seduced lady, which idea was of course scouted by the wiser listeners, that is, all the rest, as substituting a commonplace melodramatic interest for the very poetic interest arising from your conception of the character. All were anxious for the " Palace of Art," etc., and fierce with me for not bringing more. Venables is a g^eat man (at Cambridge), also Dobson. New customs, new topics, new slang phrases have come into vogue since my day, which yet was but yesterday. I don't think I could reside again at Cambridge with any pleasure. I should feel like a melancholy Pterodactyl winging his lonely flight among the linnets, eagles and flying fishes of our degenerate post- Adamic world. I have seen Gaskell, who is in the ninth heaven of happiness, going to be married the end of May. I have taken to my law again, and a little to my other studies. The [first Reform] Bill is now in the second reading, and will pass by a very small majority. The cholera is certainly abating; the preliminary symptoms have been very widely prevalent ; disorders which are cured without difficulty in our rank of life turn to malignant cholera in the poor. Casimir P^rier has had it but is recovering. The heroes of July are cutting the throats of physicians and wine merchants as you will see by the papers.
The report about Macaulay in Tennant's letter has no great foundation : at least he has not seen your book. I think Mac has some poetic taste, and would appreciate you.
Yours affectionately,
A. H. H.
Spedding wrote from Cambridge to Thompson (May 4th, 1832):
Only think of an "Apostolic " dinner next Friday, nth inst. ; present, Hallam, Trench, Kemble, Arthur Buller, Martineau, Pickering, Donne I hope, etc. etc. Only think of Heath's essay on Niebuhr the day after ! Only think of the " Palace of Art," of which you may see part of a stanza, horribly misquoted, at what should have been the beginning of this sheet I Only think of all these things, and others which your own fruitful imagination will readily suggest ! By the way, are you not tired by this time of the monotony and manufacture of your infernal county ? or if
86 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l832
you are still wandering on the sea-shore, does not your soul feel very much like
A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand
Left on the shore, that hears all night The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white ?
Do you not begin to sigh for apostolic conversation, and your dear lodgings, and River-Gods of " Mighty Michael Angelo," and the massed chestnut boughs that promise soon to put out their leaves ?
Charles Merivale also wrote to Thompson that " A daily divan continued to sit throughout the term," and that the " * Palace of Art ' was read successively to each man as he came up from the vacation." He continues :
Though the least eminent of the Tennysonian Rhapsodists, I have converted by my readings both my brother and your friend (or enemy?) Richardson to faith in the "Lotos-eaters." They rather scoflF at the former (the " Palace of Art "), and ask whether "The abysmal depths of personality" means the Times newspaper ?
Spedding wrote again to Thompson, June 21st, 1832 :
We talk out of the " Palace of Art," and the " Legend of Fair Women." The great Alfred is here (in London), i.e. in Southampton Row, smoking all the day, and we went from this house on a pilgrimage to see him, to wit, two Heaths, my brother and myself, and meeting Allen on the way we took him along with us, and when we arrived at the place appointed we found A. T. (Alfred Tennyson), and A. H. H. (Arthur Hallam), and J. M. K. (Kemble), and we made a goodly company, and did as we do at Cambridge, and but that you were not among us, we should have been happy.
And on July i8th, 1832, Spedding writes:
I say, a new volume by A. T. is in preparation, and will, I suppose, be out in Autumn. In the meantime I have no copy of the " Palace of Art," but shall be happy to repeat it to you when you come ; no copy of the " Legend of Fair Women," but
1832] TOUR ON THE RHINE. 8/
can repeat about a dozen stanzas which are of the finest; no copy of the conclusion of " CEnone," but one in pencil which none but myself can read.
This July my father and Hallam went for a tour on the Rhine.
Arthur Hallam to Emily Tennyson.
NONNENWERTH^yi^^ l6/Si, 1 832.
I expect, as far as I can calculate (but a traveller's calcula- tions are always liable to be deranged by unforeseen chances), to be in England by the end of this month, and then I shall go straight to Somersby. I had better tell you something of what Alfred and I have been doing. My last letter, I think, was from Rotterdam.
We resumed our steam-boat last Wednesday morning, and came on slowly up the Rhine; the banks of which are more uniformly ugly and flat as far as Cologne than any country I ever saw of so great an extent. Really, until yesterday, we had seen nothing in the way of scenery that deserved going a mile to see. Cologne is the paradise of painted glass : the splendour of the windows in the churches would have greatly delighted you. The Cathedral is unfinished, and if completed on the origpinal plan, would be the most stupendous and magnificent in the world. The part completed is very beautiful Gothic. Alfred was in great raptures, only complaining he had so little time to study the place. There is a gallery of pictures quite after my own heart, rich, glorious old German pictures, which Alfred accuses me of preferring to Titian and Raffaelle. In the Cathedral we saw the tomb and relics of the three kings, Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the patrons of Cologne and very miraculous persons in their day, according to sundry legends. The tomb is nearly all of pure massy gold, studded with rich precious stones.
From Cologne we came on to Bonn, which really bears a sort of family-likeness to Cambridge. Here the Rhine begins to be beautiful; and yesterday we took a luxurious climb up the Drachenf els, looked around at the mild vine-spread hillocks, and "river-sundered champaign clothed with com," ate cherries under the old castle-wall at the top of the crag, then descended
88 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l832
to a village below, and were carried over in a boat to the place from which I am writing. And what is that ? Ten years ago it was a large convent of Benedictine nuns ; now it is a large and comfortable hotel, still retaining the form of the Convent, the Cloisters, cell-like rooms, etc. It stands on an island in the middle of the river; you will understand the size of the isle, when I tell you it is rather larger, according to Alfred, than that of the Lady of Shalott, and the stream is rather more rapid than our old acquaintance that ran down to Camelot. The prospect from the window and gardens is most beautiful, the mountains, as they are called, Drachenfels being one, on one bank of the river, and Rolandseck towering up on the other, with the hills about Bingen glooming in the distance.
After their return Arthur Hallam writes to Alfred :
1832.
My dear Alfred,
Thanks for your batch of MSS. The lines.to J. S. are perfect James [Spedding], I am sure, will be most grateful. The " Old Year " is excellent. The " Little Room " is mighty pleasant^.
Remember the maxim of the Persian sage: "el Soid^ei^^ inr4xov'* Your epigram to North is good, but I have scruples whether you should publish it Perhaps he may like the lines and you the better for them; but " fiep/irfpi^o).** I think the " Lover's Tale " will be liked, as far as I can remember its old shape. Moxon is in ecstasies with the " May Queen " ; he says the volume must make a great sensation. He and your friends are anxious that it should be out before the storm of politics is abroad. The French Fleet has got the start of you, and I fear Antwerp may be taken before your last revise is ready; but still you may be beforehand with the elections, which is more
* (JVbte hy my father^
As soon as this poem was published, I altered the second line to '' All books and pictures ranged aright **; yet " Dear room, the apple of my sight " (which was much abused) is not so bad as
^Do go, dear rain, do go away.^
A. T.
1832] THE FIRST-PROOF. 89
important There has been some delay this week, owing to want of types, but the (printer's) devils are full of promise to set up immediately. Moxon has sent me the revises of " The Palace," with the notes ; they are, I believe, correct, yet I would know whether you altered " pouring glorious scorn" into " frowning," etc. In the course of next week I shall send you two composi- tions of my own, the one very trifling, an article of three pages only, in the Foreign Quarterly, the other, a pamphlet Moxon has just published for me on Rossetti's Disquisizioni sullo spirito Antipapale \ I hope you will like it ; yet I have not forgotten that the last time I sent you a publication of mine you did not even deign to read it. When should I have done the like by ' one of yours ? Perhaps you may retort with justice, that this question is like the American's remark in Mrs TroUope, to an Englishman, who had never read Bryant's poems, '' How illiberal you English are ! just let me ask you, what you would say to one of us that had never read Milton or Shakespeare, or any of your great authors ! " Fare thee well, old trump, poems are good things but flesh and blood is better. I only crave a few words.
Ever yours affectionately, A. H. H.
After staying at Kitlands.
Dorking, October lothy 1832. My dear Alfred,
I must snatch a few minutes from the overwhelming mass of law business which is now on my hands, just to talk with you about the first-proof. I had it sent down to me while I was staying at Heath's. The weather was miserably rainy, so, after breakfast, we adjourned to an arbour in the garden, and while Thompson, who was also staying there, furnished cheroots, I furnished proof-sheets. After mature examination, we came, in full conclave, to some decisions, of which you shall have the benefit. We think the type very pretty, but are rather sorry the book will not bind up with its predecessor. We admire the Buonaparte sonnet but we strongly urge the substitution of
* Among other papers Hallam wrote then were the brief though remark- able memou^ of Petrarch, Burke, and Voltaire, for the Gallery of Portraits published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
90 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l8d2
" dreamer " for " madman." The stanzas " All good things " seem to us perfect. The " Lady " (of Shalott) reads charmingly in print : the more I read it, the more I like it. You were, indeed, happily inspired when the idea of that poem first rose in your imagination. We had a long battle with Mr Heath, a famous lawyer, but no man of letters, about the last stanza in the proof. We flatter ourselves we floored him ; to be sure we were three to one, but he fought well. The principal point of attack was " cloud-white '* ; he said it was absurd to explain a fixed colour as pearl by the most variable hue in the world, that of a cloud. We recovered ourselves with all the grace of practised combatants, and talked learnedly about the context of feeling, and the conformity of the lady's dress to her magical character, till at last our opponent left us in possession of the field, declaring still between his teeth, that, for his part, he thought poetry ought to be sense. In one place a whole line was omitted. Douglas Heath read, "sudden laughters of the Tay" (Jay); without ever suspecting the misprint. I hear Tennant has written to dissuade you from publishing " Kriemhild," " Tarpeia " (in the " Fair Women "). Don't be humbugged, they are very good; you may put a note or two if you will, yet Milton did not to " Paradise Lost." Rogers the poet has been staying here, and speaks of you with admiration. Have you written to Moxon? He is anxious to have the rest of the MSS.
Ever your most affectionate Arthur.
My father wrote to Mr Moxon, in consequence of this letter from Arthur Hallam :
20 Nov. 1833. Dear Sir,
After mature consideration, I have come to a resolution of not publishing the last poem in my little volume, entitled, " Lover's Tale " : it is too full of faults and tho' I think it might conduce towards making me popular, yet, to my eye, it spoils the completeness of the book, and is better away ; of course whatever expenses may have been incurred in printing the above must devolve on me solely.
IBSa] "TENNYSON OR MILTON?" 9 1
The vol. can end with that piece titled to J. S.
We, who live in this corner of the world, only get our letters twice or thrice a week: which has caused considerable delay : but on receipt of this you may begin to dress the volume for its introduction into the world, as soon as you choose.
Believe me, Sir» yours very truly,
Alfred Tennyson.
P.S. The title-page may be simply
POEMS
By Alfred Tennyson
(don't let the printer squire me).
Be so good as to send me five copies.
Among the poems in this volume were " The Lady of Shalott " (so-called from an Italian novelette, " Donna di Scalotta"), "Mariana in the South," "The Miller's Daughter," "OEnone," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos-Eaters," " The Dream of Fair Women," " The May Queen," and *' To James Spedding " on the death of his brother Edward. After its publication Arthur Hallam wrote to my father, referring to a review of the book in the Quarterly (No. XLvn. 1833):
/ \Undated:\
Your book continues to sell tolerably and Moxon says the Quarterly has done good. Rogers defends you publicly as the most promising genius of the time. Sir Robert Inglis told my father he had heard from unquestionable authority that Alfred Tennyson was an assumed name like Barry Cornwall. I endeavoured to shake his scepticism, I fear without effect I hear to-day that a question is put up at the Cambridge Union, "Tennyson or Milton, which the greater poet.?*'
« « « « «
My father met Milman one day who denies altogether having written the infamous article [in the Quarterly^ He says he has
92 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l8d2
made a rule never to cut up any living poet. Once he made an exception in the case of a foreigner, and to his horror when at Florence he found himself invited to meet him at break- fast. Rogers thinks the first volume decidedly superior to the second....! don't quite comprehend this.
From Arthur Hallam.
[Undated.']
You are very impertinent about my talent of letter-writing ; I never said I composed my letters, now at least ; formerly I did in some sort, when Plancus was consul, and Gaskell my correspond- ent and hero of romance. Am I not thereby entitled to say of myself, as Mrs Langley said of her daughters, " Whatever accom- plishment I may possess in that way, it is entirely self-taught " ?
That labour, if labour it was, was one of love. It had nothing of the file. I composed a letter as I composed a poem. Heart and mind went into it, and why ? — because I couldn't help it I was full of thoughts so new to me that I was afraid of losing them, and took every way to treasure them : so dear they were too that I could not rest till those I loved were familiar with them.
I have been reading Mrs Jameson's Characteristics ^ and I am so bewildered with similes about groves and violets, and streams of music, and incense and attar of roses, that I hardly know what I write. Bating these little flummeries of style, it is a good book, showing much appreciation of Shakespeare and the human heart %v Sih SvoIp,
I went again to Effingham Wilson's shop to-day; he was bland and submissive, promising to send me the account as soon as he should have time to make it out. I am confident the £i I ^ will be found a mistake. A rumour is current that Mrs Arkwright has set "Oriana" to music! All the world loves her music, and " Oriana " has a fair chance of becoming as stale as the " Captive Knight." The country is in jeopardy hourly increasing. Yesterday I saw (perhaps) the last king of England go down to open the first assembly of delegates from a sovereign people. It is an unmanageable house. O'Connell
^ The sum my fether received for the 1830 volume.
1832] THE REFORM BILL. 93
raves. Government menaces. Your uncle [C. Tennyson d'Eyn- court] seems to be manoeuvring to be chief of the Penultimate Radicals, the Girondists, one might call them from their position, were they not alike destitute of genius and patriotism. But there can be no doubt that, if the Mountain continues unshaken, it must increase, and that more faint-hearted crew to which your uncle belongs will adhere to it O'Connell's speech is said to have been very effective. He and Sheil on one side ; Macaulay and Stanley on the other, there will be some fine spectacles of intellectual combat
Ever yours affectionately, A. H. H.
My father did not view the political situation so gloomily as did Arthur Hallam. It was the "dead waste and middle of the night" when the news of the passing of the Reform Bill for England and Wales had reached Somersby. This " Firm Bill," as the Lin- colnshire people called it, had stirred all hearts; and my father and some of his brothers and sisters at once sallied out into the darkness, and began to ring the church bells madly. The new parson, horrified at hear- ing his bells rung and not merely rung but furiously clashed without his leave, came rushing into his church, and in the pitch blackness laid hold of the first thing which he could clap hand to, and this happened to be my aunt Cecilia's little dog — which forthwith tried to bite. The Tennysons then disclosed themselves amid much laughter ; and the parson, who I suppose was a Tory of the old school, was with difficulty pacified. More than once my father thought of turning this scene into verse as an interesting picture of the times.
The advice as to sensitiveness^ which Hallam
^ Jowett writes to me : " Your father was very sensitive and had an honest hatred of being gossiped about. He called the malignant critics and chatterers 'mosquitoes.* He never felt any pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt a great pain at the injustice of censure. It never occurred to him that a new poet in the days of his youth was sure to provoke dangerous hostilities in the 'genus irritabile vatum,* and in the old-fashioned public**
94 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l832
gave my father at this time was wise; since the Quarterly review could not but disturb the equanimity of a mind peculiarly liable to be annoyed by captious and unintelligent criticism \ Hallam urged him to find amusement in those hair-splitting critics, " who are the bane of great art," and to assure himself that even these reviews would bring him into notice. His friends were of opinion that even the sneering savage Quarterly attack would be innocuous, for the Review was known in London to be the organ of a party, both in politics and literature. They cheered him by telling him that his very creative originality and unlikeness to any poet, his uncommon power over varied metres and rare harmonies of sound and sense, needed the creation of a taste for his work before he could be appreciated. " To raise the many," Hallam wrote, " to his own real point of view, the artist must employ his energies, and create energy in others : to descend to their position is less noble, but practicable with ease." However the estimation in which the Quarterly was then held throughout the country was given by an old Lincolnshire squire, who assured my father that " The Quarterly was the next book to God's Bible."
My father's attitude towards his critics is illustrated in the following letter*, written by him to "Christopher North " in reference to a pamphlet by Mr Lake, which
^ More than once the writer in the Quarterly wilfully misinterprets the lines and poems. For instance, in '<The Miller's Daughter" my &ther describes the mill-pool, and says :
A water-rat from off the bank Plunged in the stream.
This is explained by the reviewer as the poet 'Mikening the first intrusion of love into the virgin bosom of the miller's daughter to the plunging of a water-rat."
' This letter was found in a rag-store in Dundee in September 1895 and forwarded to me by C. M. Falconer.
1882] "CHRISTOPHER NORTH." 95
he thought " Christopher North " might be disposed to notice.
SOMERSBY, SpILSBY, LiNCOLMSHIRE.
Sir,
Tho' I am " the star of little Britain," I assure A you I do not rise or set there very cordially. I prefer vegetating in a very quiet garden where I neither see nor hear anything of the great world of literature — not lighting even upon Maga once a year. Nevertheless, in the lack of better things, a composition, mistermed a Satyre, entitled Criticism and Taste^ and particularly remarkable for the want of either, was forwarded to me, a day or two ago, by the author — with a note; he thinks I ought to promote the circulation of his book for the good of my own, does he ? so then I am to be pioneered — perhaps patronized, by Mr John Lake. Now, Sir, hew me piecemeal, cut me up any way you will, exhaust all your world of fun and fancy upon me, but do not suspect me — tho' I may have done, written, said foolish things, not excepting a silly squib to Christopher North — do not dream that I can, now or ever, own any one grain of sympathy with the ravings of this unhappy coxcomb. I would rather request you, if you do not object to meet me on such dirty ground, to shake hands over the puddle he has made.
Five months after it had been printed I saw the critique^ from which Mr L. has drawn his inspiration. I considered it at the time as somewhat too skittish and petulant, tho' it was redeemed to me by a tone of boisterous and picturesque humour such as I love. My gall might have risen a little — that it could never have contained much bitterness the weakness of my epigram ought, I think, to prove; for I trust that you will give me credit for being able to write a better.
* The Blackwood article by Wilson.
96 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l832
I could wish that some of the poems there broken on your critical wheel were deeper than ever plummet sounded. Written as they were before I had attained ^ ^ my nineteenth year they could not but contain as many faults as words. I never wish to see them or hear of them again — much less to find them dragged forward once more on your boards, if you should condescend to divide Mr L. from his one idea by replying to him. Perhaps you should not use him too harshly — tho' his arrogance deserves reproof; a consideration of the real imbecility of his nature ought to blunt the weapon.
Someone (I think M. in his cups) told a friend of mine that you were the author of an article on me in the Quarterly. I do not believe it; for I could not recognise one spark of genius or a single touch of true humour or good feeling. Moreover the man misprints me, which is worse than lying — but now that we have shaken hands (for I trust, we have) I find that you owe me an explanation. Somewhere or other you state ** Alfred is a gentleman" — to which I answer with Con- rade and Borachio, " Yea, sir, we hope " : you say after- wards, that I have forgotten what was due to myself in that character, because having previously sent you "a copy with a grateful superscription " I had publicly dis- claimed much relish for your approbation. Now upon mine honour as a gentleman, I did never send or cause to be sent any such presentation-copy, or write, indite, or cause to be written or indited any superscription, grateful or ungrateful, to any Editor of any Review or Magazine whatsoever.
Apologising for having thus far incroached on your valuable time ^
The next decade wrought a marvellous abatement ' of my father's real fault, which was undoubtedly "the
^ The signature of this letter has been cut off.
1882] "WHAT THOR SAID." 97
tendency, arising from the fulness of a mind which had not yet learned to master its resources freely, to over- crowd his composition with imagery...to which may be added an over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses, a profusion of splendours, harmonies, perfumes, gorgeous apparel, luscious meats and drinks and * creature com- forts ' which rather pall upon the sense, and make the glories of the outward world a little too obscure and overshadow the world within^"
" Alfred continued writing," as Spedding says, " like a crocodile, sideways and onward " : and defines one aspect of the poet's work in this sort of way:
(What Thor, anned with his hammer, said to the Bard
before diimer.)
Wherever evil customs thicken.
Break thro' with the hammer of iron rhyme,
Till priest-craft and king-craft sicken,
But pap-meat-pamper not the time
With the flock of the thunder-stricken.
If the world caterwaul, lay harder upon her
Till she clapperclaw no longer.
Bang thy stithy stronger and stronger.
Thy rhyme-hammer shall have honour.
Yet a poet cannot live his true life without sympathy, and he fancied that England was an unsympathetic at- mosphere, and half resolved to live abroad in Jersey, in the south of France, or in Italy. He was so far per- suaded that the English people would never care for his poetry, that, had it not been for the intervention of his friends, he declared it not unlikely that after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write.
* Spedding's Reviews and Discussions . T. L n
98 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l8S2
Spedding wrote \ as to this second volume: "The reception (of the poems), though far from triumphant, was not inauspicious ; for while they gained him many admirers, they were treated, even by those critics whose admiration, like their charity, begins and ends at home, as sufficiently notable to be worth some not unelaborate ridicule. The admiration and the ridicule served alike to bring them into notice...The superiority of his second collection of poems lay not so much in the superior workmanship (it contained perhaps fewer that were equally perfect in their kind) as in the general aim and character. If some of the blossom was gone, it was amply repaid by the more certain promise of fruit. Not only was the aim generally larger, the subjects and interest more substantial, and the endeavour more sustained, but the original and distinctive character of the man appeared more plainly. His genius was manifestly shaping a peculiar course for itself, and find- ing out its proper business ; the moral soul was begin- ning more and more to assume its due predominance, not in the way of formal preaching (the proper vehicle of which is prose), but in the shape and colour which his creations unconsciously took, and the feelings which they were made insensibly to suggest."
To his aunt, Mrs Russell, my father wrote the two following letters:
SOMERSBY.
Dearest Aunt,
What think you of the state of affairs in Europe? Burking and cholera have ceased to create much alarm. They are our least evils, but reform and
^ In 1842.
1832] LETTER TO MRS RUSSELL, 99
St Simonism are, and will continue to be, subjects of the highest interest. The future is so dark in the prospect that I am ready to cry out with the poet :
The empty thrones call out for kings. But kings are cheap as summer-dust. The good old time hath taken wings, And with it taken faith and trust. And solid hope of better things.
Reform (not the measure, but the instigating spirit of reform, which is likely to subsist among the people long after the measure has past into a law) will bring on the confiscation of Church property, and maybe the downfall of the Church altogether : but the existence of the sect of the St Simonists ^ is at once a proof of the immense mass of evil that is extant in the nineteenth century, and a focus which gathers all its rays. This sect is rapidly spreading in France, Germany and Italy, and they have missionaries in London. But I hope and trust that there are hearts as true and pure as steel in old England, that will never brook the sight of Baal in the sanctuary, and St Simon in the Church of Christ I should delight in having a line from you or Emma.
Believe me.
Ever yours most affectionately,
A. T.
^ See an interesting account of Saint-Simon and his followers in Lecky^s Democr<uy and Liberty y Vol. ii. pp. 207-215.
7—2
lOO ARTHUR HALLAM. [l833
SoMERSBY, March loth, 1833.
My dearest Aunt,
I am much grieved to find that your kind- hearted letter to me has been lying so many days unanswered. I was at Mablethorpe, a bathing-place on our bleak, flat Lincolnshire coast, when it arrived at Somersby, and as there is no species of post between the latter and the former place, I have only just now received it together with some others. I have sent Emma's^ picture to 15 Portland Place. I recollect when I first saw it, thinking that it did not do her justice: it wanted her life and vivacity. I would have forwarded this portrait to you long ago, and likewise visited you by the proxy of a letter, but to me as to Dante, " La diritta via era smarrita," for I knew not where you were. What astrologer can point out the place of any star that moves perpetually under a cloud ?
You have been singing too in your solitude, and I should like much to hear some of your melodies, but a malicious fatality always seems to thwart me: the ghost of some ex-amateur, jealous of your notes, thrusts himself between me and any possible piano you may sit down to. My grandfather had lately a very severe fit of the gout, — Mr B.^ stayed two nights in the house, — but our last accounts are that he is pretty well recovered and rides out, I believe, as usual.
Mary remembers having once met you at Tealby : I wish you knew her better — she is a girl of great feeling
^ Her daughter, Lady Boyne.
• Mr B , the county doctor, would miss out his " h's," and say : " Mr
Tennyson, I work 'ard and get up so early that I 'eat my own grate." He was in the habit of riding about at night with a gig-lamp fastened to each foot, for fear of being run over.
1838] THE RHINE, lOI
and very warm in her attachments to her female friends, and true feeling is all that is really valuable on the windy side of the grave. For myself, I drag on somewhat heavily thro' the ruts of life, sometimes moping to myself like an owl in an ivy-bush, or that one sparrow which the Hebrew mentioneth as sitting on the housetop (a passage which used always to make me uncomfortable), and sometimes smoking a pipe with a neighbouring parson and cursing O'Connell for as double-dyed a rascal as ever was dipped in the Styx of political villainy \ Last year, however, Hallam and myself steamed up the Rhine as far as Bingen ; we had the pleasure of being moored by a muddy island, full of stagnant dykes, in the river Maas, where we performed quarantine for a week, and saw by night the boats, from the cholera vessels stationed in the river, creeping round to the burial-place of the island with a corpse and a lantern. We at last got so enraged that we pulled down the Dutch colours and reversed them, which put the ancient skipper into such indignation that he swore he would hang us at the yard-arm.
We returned by Aix-la-Chapelle and Brussels. My mother, who, as you know, is one of the most angelick natures on God's earth, always doing good as it were by a sort of intuition, continues in tolerable health, though somewhat harassed with the cares incident to so large a family. She sends the essence of all love to you and yours, and begs me to state how happy it would make her to see you at Somersby : indeed this is a wish in which we all cordially join, tho' for my own part I have very faint hopes that you will gratify it. Many thanks for your present and letter.
Love to Emma and compliments to Gustavus^ I
^ He softened this opinion when he came to know more about O'Connell. ^ The baby son is the present Lord Boyne.
I02 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l883
hope for his own peace of mind that he will have as little of the Tennyson about him as possible.
Believe me,
My dearest Aunt,
Ever your most aflfectionate nephew,
A. T.
During these years the Tennysons seem to have taken turns in going to London. We hear of my uncle Charles seeing his Cambridge friends in town. " Brook- field is melancholy and not fancy-free." " John Kemble is buried in Gothic manuscripts, and will only talk of Runes and Eddas, and of the brave knight Siegfried." Arthur Hallam is " as kind as ever," and Charles rides with him " through the beautiful Norwood country." In March of this year we are told that Arthur Hallam, Alfred and Mary enjoyed their sight-seeing in London together. They visited the Elgin Marbles, the Tower and the Zoological Gardens. They looked through microscopes at "moths' wings, gnats' heads, and at all the lions and tigers which lie perdus in a drop of spring water." My father would say, on looking through the microscope, "Strange that these wonders should draw some men to God and repel others. No more reason in one than in the other."
In July Arthur Hallam wrote to my father who was in Scotland :
July 3 1 J/, 1833.
I feel to-night what I own has been too uncommon with me of late, a strong desire to write to you. I do own I feel the want of you at some times more than at others ; a sort of yearning for dear old Alfred comes upon me, and that without
1833] VISITS TO SCOTLAND AND LONDON. IO3
any particularly apparent reason. I missed you much at Somersby — not for want of additional excitement, I was very happy. I had never been at Somersby before without you. However I hope you are not unpleasantly employed in the land of cakes and broiled fish. I hear that you were charmed with the amiability of the Gardens ; I also hear in town that the old Monteiths have been here instead of there. I trust you finished the " Gardener's Daughter," and enriched her with a few addi- tional beauties drawn from the ancient countenance of Monteith's aunt. Have you encountered any Highland girl with " a shower for her dower " ? I should like much to hear your adventures, but I daresay it will be difficult to persuade you to write to Vienna, whither I am going on Saturday with tolerable speed. At all events if you have any traveller's tale to tell, do not tell it often enough to get tired of it before we meet. I am going perhaps as far as Buda. I shall present your poetic respects to the, Danube and to certain parts of Tyrol. In the parcel which^. accompanies this you will find a volume of poems by Hartley Coleridge, much of which I think you will agree with me is exquisitely beautiful. Probably Charles and Septimus will like the sonnets more than you will. I desire and peremptorily^, issue my orders that Emily may not be debarred from f ull» £^ and free reading of that book by any of her brothers.
A, H. H..
My father went with Tennant to London to^ say farewell to his friend, before he set out abroad. There- was a supper at my father's lodgings, and Tennant writes^ to Septimus Tennyson :
Moxon and Leigh Hunt were there, and we did not separate till half-past four o'clock : Alfred repeated glorious fragments of the " Gardener's Daughter," which seemed to produce proper effect upon Leigh Hunt. Yesterday we went in a troop to see Rogers' (the poet's) gallery of paintings : superb Titian, very beautiful Raphael Madonna, and in fact all art gems \ There is a fresco
^ The Titian, presumably J^oli me tangere^ and the (so-called) Giotto, a fragment with two Apostles^ heads, as well as the Madonna, which had belonged to the Orleans collection, are now in the National Gallery.
I04 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l833
by Giotto. In the library we found Charles' volume but not Alfred's. There were many proofs of the engravings that will appear in his (Rogers') forthcoming volume.
Hallam sent as a parting present to Emily Ten- nyson the Pensees de Pascal, and Silvio Pellico. In August he started with his father for the " Tyrol, and Salzburg." " Never have mountains seemed to him so sublime." He admired "the independence and self- respect of the Tyrolese." Vienna he compared to Paris, but found the city "more uniformly handsome." He visited the Treasure Chamber, where he saw " the largest diamond in the world." The Prater was dismal, "insipid, worse even than the Corso at Milan or the Cascine at Florence." But he revelled in the picture gallery and wrote about it as follows:
Sept 6ih, 1833.
The gallery is grand and I longed for you : two rooms full of Venetian pictures only ; such Giorgiones, Falmas, Bordones, Paul Veroneses ! and oh Alfred such Titians ! by Heaven, that man could paint ! I wish you could see his 9^nae. Bo you just write as perfect a Danae ! Also there are two fine rooms of Rubens, but I know you are an exclusive, and care little for Rubens, in which you are wrong : although no doubt Titian's imagination and style are more analogous to your own than those of Rubens or of any other school.
A. rl. rl.
That is the last letter from Arthur Hallam. With his letters I find these MS lines :
I do but mock me with the questionings.
Dark, dark, irrecoverably dark
Is the soul's eye; yet how it strives and battles
Through the impenetrable gloom to fix
That master light, the secret truth of things.
Which is the body of the Infinite God.
A. H. H.
1883] DEATH OF ARTHUR HALLAM. I05
He died at Vienna on Sept. 15th, 1833. When Mr Hallam returned from his daily walk, he saw Arthur asleep as he supposed upon the couch ; a blood-vessel near the brain had suddenly burst : it was not sleep but death.
•n October ist a letter from Arthur Hallam's uncle, Henry Elton, at Clifton, brought the sorrowful news to my father :
At the desire of a most afflicted family, I write to you because they are unequal from the grief into which they have fallen to do it themselves. Your friend, sir, and my much-loved nephew, Arthur Hallam, is no more. It has pleased God to remove him from this, his first scene of existence, to that better world for which he was created. He died at Vienna, on his return from Buda, by apoplexy, and I believe his remains come by sea from Trieste. Mr Hallam arrived this morning in 3 Princes Buildings. May that Being in whose hands are all the destinies of man, and who has promised to comfort all that mourn, pour the balm of consolation on all the families, who are bowed down by this unexpected dispensation! I have just seen Mr Hallam, who begs I will tell you that he will write himself as soon as his heart will let him. Poor Arthur had a slight attack of ague, which he had often had, ordered his fire to be lighted, and talked with as much cheerfulness as usual. He suddenly became insensible, s^nd his spirit departed without pain. On examination it was the general opinion that he could not have lived long. This was also Dr Holland's opinion. The account I have endeavoured to give you is merely what I have been able to gather, but the family of course are in too great distress to enter into details.
{Extract of letter from John M. Kemble to
Fanny Kemble^)
It is with feelings of inexpressible pain that I annoimce to you the death of poor Arthur Hallam, who expired suddenly from an attack of apoplexy at Vienna, on the 15th of last
^ Given me by Miss Cobbe.
I06 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l833
month. Though this was always feared by us as likely to occur, the shock has been a bitter one to bear : and most of all so to the Tennysons, whose sister Emily he was to have married. I have not yet had the courage to write to Alfred. This is a loss which will most assuredly be felt by this age, for if ever man >y was bom for great things he was. Never was a more powerful intellect joined to a purer and holier heart; and the whole illuminated with the richest imagination, with the most sparkling yet the kindest wit. One cannot lament for him that he is gone to a far better life, but we weep over his coffin and wonder that we cannot be consoled: the Roman epitaph on two young children Sibimet ipsis dolorem abstulerunU suis reliquere (from themselves they took away pain, to their friends they left it !) is alway present to my mind, and somehow the miserable feeling of loneliness comes over one even though one knows that the dead are happier than the living. His poor father was with him only ; they had been travelling together in Hungary and were on their return to England ; but there had been nothing what- ever to announce the fatal termination of their journey ; indeed bating fatigue Arthur had been unusually wdl.
On December 30th Henry Hallam wrote to my father as follows:
It may remove some anxiety from the minds of yourself and others to know that the mortal part of our dearest Arthur will be interred at Clevedon on Friday. I leave town to-morrow. My first thought was not to write to you till all was over : but you may have been apprehensive for the safety of the vessel. I did not expect her arrival so soon. Use your own discretion about telling your sister. Mrs H. is very anxious to hear about her; if not too painful to her. Miss Tennyson will have the kindness to write. Do your utmost, my dear young friend, to support her and yourself. Give as little way to grief as you may. But I feel that my own rather increases with time ; yet I find also that both occupation and conversation are very serviceable. I fear the solitary life you both lead in the country is sadly unpropitious. We are now all well, though my boy * is not as vigorous as he should be. God bless you all.
Affectionately yours, H. H.
^ Harry Hallam.
1834] BURIAL OF ARTHUR HALLAM. I07
In the letters from Arthur Hallam's friends there was a rare unanimity of opinion about his worth. Milnes, writing to his father, says that he had a "very deep respect " for Hallam, and that Thirlwall, in after years the great Bishop, for whom Hallam and my father had a profound affection, was " actually captivated by him." When at Cambridge with Hallam he had written : " He is the only man here of my own standing before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything." Alford writes : " Hallam was a man of wonderful mind and knowledge on all subjects, hardly credible at his age.... I long ago set him down for the most wonderful person I ever knew. He was of the most tender, affectionate disposition."
So " those whose eyes must long be dim with tears," Henry Hallam says, " brought him home to rest among his kindred and in his own country": and the burial took place on Jan. 3rd, 1834, in the lonely church which overlooks the Bristol Channel.
On the evening of one of these sad ^ winter days my father had already noted down in his scrap-book some fragmentary lines, which proved to be the germ of " In Memoriam " :
Where is the voice I loved? ah where Is that dear hand that I would press? Lo! the broad heavens cold and bare,
The stars that know not my distress!
« « « « «
The vapour labours up the sky. Uncertain forms are darkly moved! Larger than human passes by The shadow of the man I loved, And clasps his hands, as one that prays!
* Francis Garden had written to Trench, Nov. 26th, 1833: "When in London, I saw a letter from poor Alfred Tennyson. Both himself and his family seemed plunged in the deepest affliction.**
I08 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l834
Later, Henry Hallam writes to my father :
It is my intention to print, for private friends only, a few of those pieces which have already appeared, with some poems and perhaps prose papers that I have in my possession. Several of those printed in 1830, and a certain number that are in manu- script, will be included. It will be necessary to prefix a short memoir. I must rely on his contemporaries and most intimate friends to furnish me with part of my materials ; and I should wish to have anything that may be thought most worthy of being mentioned, communicated to me by letter. Perhaps you would do something. I should desire to have the character of his mind, his favourite studies and pursuits, his habits and views delineated. I shall not apply to too many persons ; but it has been suggested to me that Spedding will be better able to assist me than any one else. I do not know whether this is the case,
nor do I know Mr S.'s direction. It is somewhere in Cumberland.
It
I shall be most happy if you can give me a better account than the last we have had of your sister ; we all unite in kindest love to all.
Most truly yours, Henry Hallam^.
To this volume of collected poems and essays, pub- lished some time after, Henry Hallam prefixed an intro- duction, in which he said " Arthur seemed to tread the earth as a spirit from a better world." Arthur's old Eton friend Gladstone wrote: "When much time has elapsed, when most bereavements will be forgotten, he will still be remembered, and his place, I fear, will be felt to be still vacant, singularly as his mind was calcu- lated by its native tendencies to work powerfully and for good, in an age full of import to the nature and destinies of man."
In consequence of her sudden and terrible grief my aunt Emily was ill for many months, and very slowly recovered. "We were waiting for her," writes one of her friends, " in the drawing-room the first day since her
1 See Appendix, p. 498, for Letters about Arthur Hallam.
1834] FIRST MS SECTIONS OF " IN MEMORIAM." IO9
loss that she had been able to meet anyone, and she came at last, dressed in deep mourning, a shadow of her former self, but with one white rose in her black hair as her Arthur loved to see her."
" The Two Voices " or " Thoughts of a Suicide " was begun under the cloud of this overwhelming sorrow, which, as my father told me, for a while blotted out all joy from his life, and made him long for death, in spite of his feeling that he was in some measure a help and comfort to his sister. But such a first friendship and such a loss helped to reveal himself to himself, while he enshrined his sorrow in his song. Tennant writes: " Alfred although much broken in spirits is yet able to divert his thoughts from gloomy brooding, and keep his mind in activity."
In the earliest manuscript of " The Two Voices " a fine verse is found which was omitted in the published edition as too dismal (after " under earth").
From when his baby pulses beat
To when his hands in their last heat
Pick at the death-mote in the sheet.
Then in the same manuscript-book come the first written sections of " In Memoriam," in the following order :
Fair ship that from the Italian shore.
{written on a stray sheet)
With trembling fingers did we weave. When Lazarus left his charnel-cave. This truth came borne with bier and pall. It draweth near the birth of Christ.
And between " With trembling fingers " and " When Lazarus left his charnel-cave " he has written the first draft of his " Morte d' Arthur."
no ARTHUR HALLAM. [l831^
Unpubushed Poems of this Period.
The Statesman^
They wrought a work which Time reveres, A pure example to the lands, Further and further reaching hands
For ever into coming years ;
They worshipt Freedom for her sake ; We faint unless the wanton ear Be tickled with the loud " hear, hear,"
To which the slight-built hustings shake ;
For where is he, the citizen.
Deep-hearted, moderate, firm, who sees His path before him ? not with these,
Shadows of statesmen, clever men I
Uncertain of ourselves we chase The clap of hands ; we jar like boys : And in the hurry and the noise
Great spirits grow akin to base.
A sound of words that change to blows !
A sound of blows on armed breasts I
And individual interests Becoming bands of armed foes !
A noise of hands that disarrange The social engine I fears that waste The strength of men, lest overhaste
Should fire the many wheels of change I
* Copyright, 1897, by The Macmillan Company.
1838] "THE STATESMAN." Ill
111 fares a people passion-wrought, A land of many days that cleaves In two great halves, when each one leaves
The middle road of sober thought !
y Not he that breaks the dams, but he That thro' the channels of the state Convoys the people's wish, is great ; His name is pure, his fame is free :
He cares, if ancient usage fade,
To shape, to settle, to repair.
With seasonable changes fair. And innovation grade by grade :
Or, if the sense of most require
A precedent of larger scope.
Not deals in threats, but works with hope. And lights at length on his desire :
Knowing those laws are just alone That contemplate a mighty plan. The frame, the mind, the soul of man,
Like one that cultivates his own.
He, seeing far an end sublime, ^' Contends, despising party-rage,
To hold the Spirit of the Age Against the Spirit of the Time.
112 ARTHUR HALLAM. [l83d
1833.
I
Youth, lapsing thro' fair solitudes,
Pour'd by long glades and meadowy mounds,
Crown'd with soft shade her deepening floods That wash'd her shores with blissful sounds :
Her silver eddies in their play
Drove into lines and studs of light The image of the sun by day,
The image of the moon by night.
The months, ere they began to rise. Sent thro' my blood a prophet voice
Before the first white butterflies. And where the secret streams rejoice.
I heard Spring laugh in hidden rills,
Summer thro' all her sleepy leaves Murmur'd : a voice ran round the hills
When corny Lammas bound the sheaves :
A voice, when night had crept on high.
To snowy crofts and winding scars, Rang like a trumpet clear and dry,
And shook the frosty winter stars.
When I was somewhat older grown
These voices did not cease to cry, Only they took a sweeter tone.
But did not sound so joyfully :
Lower and deeper evermore
They grew, and they began at last To speak of what had gone before,
And how all things become the past
* Copyright, 1897, by The MacmiUan Company.
1833] " YOUTH." 1 1 3
Life, to this wind, tum'd all her vanes, Moan'd in her chimneys and her eaves;
I grieved as woods in dripping rains Sigh over all their fallen leaves;
Beside my door at morning stood
The tearful spirit of the time; He moan'd, " I wander from my good I "
He chanted some old doleful rhyme.
So lived I without aim or choice, Still humming snatches of old song.
Till suddenly a sharper voice Cried in the future "Come along."
When to this sound my face I tum'd.
Intent to follow on the track, Again the low sweet voices mourn'd
In distant fields, "Come back, come back."
Confused, and ceasing from my quest,
I loiter'd in the middle way. So pausing 'twixt the East and West,
I found the Present where I stay:
Now idly in my natal bowers,
Unvext by doubts I cannot solve, I sit among the scentless flowers
And see and hear the world revolve:
Yet well I know that nothing stays. And I must traverse yonder plain:
Sooner or later from the haze The second voice will peal again.
T.I. 8
114 ARTHUR HALLAM. [I888
II
A rumour of a mystery,
A noise of winds that meet and blend, An energy, an agony,
A labour working to an end.
Now shall I rest or shall I rise?
It is the early morning, Hark! A voice like many voices cries.
Comes hither throbbing thro' the dark;
Now one faint line of light doth glow,
I follow to the morning sun, Behind yon hill the trumpets blow.
And there is something greatly done:
The voice cries "Come." Upon the brink
A solitary fortress burns. And shadows strike and shadows sink.
And Heaven is dark and bright by turns.
"Come" and I come, the wind is strong: Hush! there floats upward from the gulf
A murmur of heroic song,
A howling of the mountain wolf;
A tempest strikes the craggy walls. Faint shouts are heard across the glen,
A moan of many waterfalls.
And in the pauses groans of men.
"Come" and I come, no more I sleep: The thunder cannot make thee dumb;
"Come" and I come, the vale is deep. My heart is dark, but yet I come.
1888] " YOUTH." 1 1 5
Up hither have I found my way, The latest thunder-peal hath peal'd,
Down from the summit sweeps the day And rushes o'er a boundless field.
Out bursts a rainbow in the sky — Away with shadows! On they move!
Beneath those double arches lie Fair with green fields the realms of Love.
The whole land glitters after rain, Thro' wooded isles the river shines,
The casements sparkle on the plain. The towers gleam among the vines;
"Come" and I come, and all comes back Which in that early voice was sweet.
Yet am I dizzy in the track,
A light wind wafts me from my feet
Warm beats my blood, my spirit thirsts;
Fast by me flash the cloudy streaks, And from the golden vapour bursts
A mountain bright with triple peaks:
With all his groves he bows, he nods.
The clouds unswathe them from the height,
And there sit figures as of Gods
Ra/d round with beams of living light
CHAPTER V*
THE 1832 VOLUME (dated 1833). SOLITUDE AND WORK (1833-1835).
Mighty the voices of earth, which are dullM by the voices that say : '' All of us drift into darkness, wherein we shall all pass away ! ** Better to pass then at once than seeing the darkness to stay. But for a mightier Voice which was bom of the Dawn of the Day.
It becomes no man to nurse despair, But in the teeth of clenchM antagonisms To follow up the worthiest
Before following further the thread of the life, I must set down here certain notes upon the 1832 volume by my father and by Edward Fitzgerald, omitted from the last chapter, in order not to interrupt the sequence of Arthur Hallam's letters,
Fitzgerald writes on " The Lady of Shalott " :
Well I remember this poem, read to me, before I knew the author, at Cambridge one night in 1832 or 3, and its images passing across my head, as across the magic mirror, while half asleep on the mail coach to London '' in the creeping dawn "
that followed.^
«
The key to this tale of magic " symbolism " is of deep human significance, and is to be found in the lines :
iMSNote, E. F. G. * Copyright, 1897, by The MacmiUan Comp«nj.
116
1888], "THE miller's DAUGHTER." II7
Or when the moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed; "I am half sick of shadows/' said The Lady of Shalott.
Canon Ainger in his Tennyson for the Young quotes the following interpretation, given him by my father :
The new-bom love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities.
The idea of " Mariana in the South " came to my father as he was travelling between Narbonne and Perpignan \ and foreign critics have found out and have appreciated this representation of southern France.
The first original manuscript verse of " The Miller's Daughter," which he altered both before and after publi- cation, seemed to Fitzgerald too good to be lost :
I met in all the close green ways,
While walking with my rod and line. The miller with his mealy face.
And long'd to take his hand in mine. He look'd so jolly and so good —
While fishing in the milldam-water, I laugh'd to see him as he stood,
And dreamt not of the miller's daughter.
" This poem," Fitzgerald writes, " as may be seen, is much altered and enlarged from the first edition of 1832 ; in some respects, I think, not for the better; losing somewhat of the easy character of *talk across the walnuts and the wine.'" It shows the poet's especial love of setting his human beings in a landscape which is strictly in harmony with the subject of the poem. •* The mill was no particular mill," my father writes ; " if
^ See letter from Arthur Hallam on ^ Mariana in the South '^ in Appendix, p. 500.
Il8 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [l883-
I thought at all of any mill it was that of Trumpington near Cambridge."
From the volume of 1832 he omitted several stanzas of " The Palace of Art " because he thought that the poem was too full. " The artist is known by his self- ^ limitation " was a favourite adage of his. He allowed me however to print some of them in my notes, otherwise I should have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he had excised. He " gave the people of his best," and he usually wished that his best should remain without variorum readings, " the chips of the workshop," as he called them. The love of bibliomaniacs for first editions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously in many cases the worst editions ; and once he said to me:
"Why do they treasure the rubbish I shot from my fuU-finish'd cantos?
For himself many passages in Wordsworth and other poets had been entirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading along with the text. Be- sides, in his case, very often what is published as the latest edition has been the original version in his first manuscript, so that there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what may seem to be a new word or a new passage. " For instance," he said, " in * Maud ' a line in the first edition was * I will bury myself in my books, and the Devil may pipe to his own,' which was afterwards altered to ' I will bury myself in my self ^ etc' : this was highly commended by the critics as an im- provement on the (?f7/i«tf/ reading — but it was actually in the first MS draft of the poem."
In 1890 he wrote the following notes: " Trench said to me, when we were at Trinity together, * Tennyson, we cannot live in art.' " " * The Palace of Art ' is the
18S6] "THE PALACE OF ART." II9
embodiment of my own belief that the Godlike life is with man and for man, that
Beauty, Good and Knowledge are three sisters... That never can be sunder d without tears. And he that shuts out Love, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie, Howling in outer darkness."
"When I first conceived the plan of the poem, I intended to have introduced both sculptures and paint- ings into it, but I only finished two sculptures.
One was the Tishbite whom the raven fed. As when he stood on Carmel-steeps
With one arm stretch'd out bare, and mock'd and said, • Come, cry aloud, he sleeps.'
Tall, eager, lean and strong, his cloak wind-borne Behind, his forehead heavenly bright
From the clear marble pouring glorious scorn, Lit as with inner light.
One was Olympias; the floating snake Roird round her ankles, round her waist
Knotted, and folded once about her neck. Her perfect lips to taste,
Down from the shoulder moved : she seeming blithe
Declined her head: on every side The dragon's curves melted, and mingled with
The woman's youthful pride Of rounded limbs —
After the old verse xxvi was
*From shape to shape at first within the womb
The brain is moulded,' she began, *And thro' all phases of all thought I come
Unto the perfect man.
I20 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [I888-
AH nature widens upward. Evermore
The simpler essence lower lies, More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise/
In the centre of the four quadrangles of the palace is a tower.
Hither, when all the deep unsounded skies Shudder'd with silent stars, she clomb,
And as with optic glasses her keen eyes Pierced thro' the mystic dome,
Regions of lucid matter taking forms,
Brushes of fire, hazy gleams, Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms
Of suns, and starry streams.
She saw the snowy poles and Moons of Mars,
That mystic field of drifted light In mid Orion, and the married stars.
The * Moons of Mars ' is the only modern reading here, all the rest are more than half a century old."
After perusing the " marvellously compressed word- pictures of this poem," Fitzgerald appends a personal note to "sat smiling babe in arm."
I remember A. T.^ admiring the abstracted look of a Murillo Madonna at Dulwich ; the eyes of which are on you, but seem " looking at something beyond, beyond the Actual into Abstrac- tion/' This has been noticed of some great men ; it is the trance of the Seer: I do not remember seeing it in A. T. himself; great as he was from top to toe, and his eyes dark, powerful and serene*.
He was still afraid of blindness, which his brother Frederick said might accompany the perception of the inward Sublime as in Homer and Milton. The names of Dante and Michael Angelo
^ Fitzgerald generally calls my fother A. T.
* Fitzgerald afterwards altered his mind and wrote : ** I have seen it in Ais (A. T.^s) . Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose It may be the same with all pods.^
4886] "A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN." 121
in (the original form of) this poem remind me that once looking with A. T. at two busts of Dante and Goethe in a shop window in Regent Street, I said, "What is there wanting in Goethe which the other has ? " " The Divine ^ ! "
After visiting Italy some twenty years after this poem was written, he told me he had been prepared for Raffaelle but not for Michael Angelo : whose picture at Florence of a Madonna drag- ging a " ton of a child *' over one shoulder almost revolted him at first, but drew him toward itself afterwards, and " would not out of memory." I forget if he saw the Dresden Raffaelle', but he would speak of the Child in it as " perhaps finer than the whole composition, in so far as one's eyes are more concentrated on the subject. The child seems to me the furthest reach of human art His attitude is a man's: his countenance a Jupiter's — perhaps too much so." But when A. T. had a babe of his own, he saw it was not " too much so." " I am afraid of him : babies have an expression of grandeur which children lose, a look of awe and wonder. I used to think the old painters overdid the expression and dignity of their infant Christs, but I see they didn't This morning * * * lay half-an-hour worshipping the bed-post on which the sunlight flickered (pure nature worship)*. * If,' as old Hallam said, ' one could have the history of a babe's mind!'"
The "Dream of Fair Women" began in the first edition of 1832 with some stanzas about a man sailing in a balloon, but my father did not like the "balloon stanzas " so they were cut out. As Edward Fitzgerald said to him, " They make a perfect poem by themselves without affecting the * dream/ "
As when a man that sails in a balloon,
Down-looking sees the solid shining ground
Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon, Tilth, hamlet, mead and mound:
^ To me, he said, <^ The Divine intensity ^"^ and possibly the same to Fitzgerald. H. T.
' He went to Dresden on purpose to see this great picture.
* *' Afterwards he took to fetish- worship — the worship of a gilded doll sent him by Lear." A. T.
122 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [l833.
And takes his flags and waves them to the mob, That shout below, all faces turn'd to where
Glows rubylike the far-up crimson globe, Fiird with a finer air:
So, lifted high, the poet at his will
Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all,
Higher thro' secret splendours mounting still. Self-poised, nor fears to fall,
Hearing apart the echoes of his fame.
While I spoke thus, the seedsman. Memory, Sow'd my deep-furrow'd thought with many a name
Whose glory will not die.
From the letters of that time I gather that there was a strong current of depreciation of my father in certain literary quarters. However he kept up his courage, ^ profited by friendly and unfriendly criticism, and in si- lence, obscurity, and solitude, perfected his art. " First the workman is known for his work, afterwards the work for the workman " : but it is " only the concise and perfect work," he thought, " which will last \ "
That the volume of 1832 was partially successful (three hundred copies having been sold) is obvious from the fact that Moxon was eager to publish more by him. Later an appreciative article by John Stuart Mill in the London Review (July 1835) was a great encouragement. Friendly critics, like G. S. Venables, wrote that his poems had too much concentrated power and thought, were too imaginative and too largely imbued with the " inner- most magic," easily to excite popular interest, or to be read at once by those whom he specially wished to influence. Kemble had said, " In Alfred's mind the materials of the greatest works are heaped in an abun- dance which is almost confusion." Notwithstanding all
»A.T.
1886] HIS HAND ON THE LEVER. 1 23
hostile criticism, he had impressed himself deeply on a limited number of minds. He now began to base his poetry more on the " broad and common interests of the time and of universal humanity," although no doubt it was harder to idealize such themes than those that appealed mostly to the imagination. The great Catholic painters could express what was at the same time ideal and real in the minds of the people : but the modem artist has hardly ever found similar objects of high imagination and intense popular feeling for his art to work upon. If, wrote Venables, in a contemporary letter to my father, an artist could only now find out where these objects are, he would be the artist of modern times. Venables affirmed they were not to be sought in any transient fashions of thought, but in the "convergent tendencies of many opinions'* on religion, art and nature, — of which tendencies he and others believed, he said, that my father, with his commanding intellect, and conspicuous moral courage, ought to be the artistic exponent and unifier. My father pondered all that had been said and — after a period of utter prostra- tion from grief, and many dark fits of blank despondency — his passionate love of truth, of nature, and of human- ity, drove him to work again, with a deeper and a fuller insight into the requirements of the age.
His resolve Upbore him and firm faith — And beating up thro' all the bitter world, Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, Kept him a living souP.
Two pathetic lines of his written at this time are left :
O leave not thou thy son forlorn; Teach me, great Nature : make me live.
" Perpetual idleness," he would say, " must be one of
* << Enoch Arden."
124 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [l83a-
the punishments of HelL'' Hundreds of lines were, as he expressed it, ** blown up the chimney with his pipe- smoke, or were written down and thrown into the fire, as not being then perfect enough." " The Brook " in later years was actually rescued from the waste-paper heap.
He lived for the most part at Somersby, and I give a list of his week's work ; which he drew up.
Monday. History, German.
Tuesday. Chemistry, German.
Wednesday. Botany, German.
Thursday. Electricity, German.
Friday. Animal Physiology, German.
Saturday. Mechanics.
Sunday. Theology.
Next Week. Italian in the afternoon.
Third Week. Greek. Evenings. Poetry.
Unpubushed Poem of this Period. The Mothet^s Ghost.
Not a whisper stirs the gloom,
It will be the dawning soon, We may glide from room to room,
In the glimmer of the moon: Every heart is lain to rest,
All the house is fast in sleep, Were I not a spirit blest.
Sisters, I could almost weep!
In that cradle sleeps my child, She whose birth brought on my bliss:
On her forehead undefiled I will print an airy kiss:
1836] Montgomery's judgment. 125
See, she dreameth happy dreams, Her hands are folded quietly,
Like to one of us she seems. One of us my child will be.
Now and then, when he could save up a little hoard, he went to London or to visit his friends in their homes. From the occasional letters to and from them (1832-35) we can see something of what his life was and the im- pression which his work was then making.
Brookfield writes from Sheffield :
You and Rob Montgomery are our only brewers now ! A propos to the latter, Jingling James, his namesake, dined with us last week And now for a smack of Boswell.
Brookfield. Glass of wine after your fish? Montgomery. Thank you, sir ! B. Which vegetable, sir ? M, A potato, if you please! B. Another, sir! M. That will do, I thank you. B. Talking of potatoes, sir, have you read Alfred Tennyson ? M. Only in the reviews yet, but there are two brothers, aren't there? B. Both "rather pretty," but Alfred alone has been extracted at any length in the reviews. M. He has very wealthy and luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, and IS a poet. But there is plenty of room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your trim correct young writers seldom turn out well. A young poet should have a great deal which he can afford to throw away as he gets older. Tennyson can afford this. But I can say little of one of whom I have seen so little.
I sent him copies of both you and Charles yesterday, and met him in the street this morning. He said he was going out of town, but we would talk about you when he came back and read you. "I read," said he, "twelve of the sonnets last night, which if I had not liked them better than other sonnets I could not have done. There are great outbreaks of poetry in them." Omitting my own interjectional queries, etc., which leave to Jemmy's remarks an over-pompous connectedness which they had not vivd voce, I give you his words as nearly as I remember. They are not important, but we generally wish to know what
126 SOUTUDE AND WORK. [l833
is said of us, whether trivial or not At autopsychography I am not good, if I had any idiopsychology to autopsychographize. I am just about as happy as a fish, neither excited by mirth, nor depressed by sadness. The Clerk's^ letter awoke me rather this morning ; if he be yet with you tell him it had been good service to have done so two months earlier. Writing from Somersby where there is so much to prevent one from thinking of any place else was certainly a meritorious exertion, and it has brought my pardon. My love to the wretch, and let him know he shall expiate his neglect by silence on my part, until I know whether his address be your house. Which information do thou give me in a day or two; and tell me all about Frederick and Charles. From the former I never could worm a letter yet, but unless you can coax so much of him without, I shall perhaps make one more effort shortly. My kindest regards to all your family.
Ever, dearest Alfred, yours,
W. H. Brookfield.
P.S. I wish very much you would make a sonnet for me as Hallam once did. I could not value it more, and should not less, than his. It may be that I could not make a more boring request. But I will incur nine chances of vexing you and thereby myself for the sake of the tenth of getting what I want.
At this time Tennant shot an arrow : " May your success in rhyming vary inversely as the number of letters you write ! " and Spedding sent to Somersby his Union speech on Liberty, which had gained renown in the University. The poem " You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease" was not, as is often stated, "an edition of this speech versified." My father said to me that he and Spedding freely interchanged their political views, and that therefore it was not unlikely that there should be a similarity of thought and language. He did not think
' Charles Turner.
1833] LETTER TO SPEDDING. 1 27
that he had ever read the speech when he wrote the poem.
He wrote to Spedding, begging him to " commend " a book shortly to be published by an old Louth tutor of his, Mr Dale :
SOMERSBYy
February gth (1833*?)
My dear James,
I seize upon a halfsheet, the blank half of a printed prospectus of a translation of the "Osman Sultan's campaigns in Western Asia, from Bayezyd Ildirim to the death of Murad the Fourth (i 389-1640), from the German of Joseph Von Hammer, by Thomas Aquila Dale^" indeed mine ancient tutor and paidagogue in times of yore. Which work commend everywhere, for, I think, he is likely to do it well, and the book will contain a map of the countries from Sinope to Tiflis, and from Odana to Bagdad. Which map will be three feet and a half by two and a half, and you will grant that our literature is marvellously deficient in works of Oriental History. And as I said before the man is mine ancient and trusty paidagogue, and moreover a good man, and one that is publishing at a loss, and one that has no/ two cloaks, wherefore it is reasonable that you should commend his book. For your letter I thank you heartily: my thanks have lost half their natural vigour and beauty ; however you must recollect that half your epistle was to someone else, indeed you confessed as much in your P. S. Are we not quits then, or in the language of Mrs Jennings, " Does not one shoulder of mutton drive out another? " You should not have written to me without telling me somewhat that was interesting to myself
^ The letters of this time are often undated.
* Published by William Straker, West Strand, 1835.
128 SOUTUDE AND WORK. [l833
(always the first consideration !) or that bore some refer- ence to you and yours (always the second !), or lastly, without giving me some news of the great world, for know you not I live so far apart from the bustle of life that news becomes interesting to me? I assure you that we have a spare bed and the bed is not so spare either, but a bed both plump and pulpy, and fit for " your domeship \" whenever you can come and see us. I express myself very clumsily, but being overawed by the memory of your calm personal dignity and dome, and melted likewise with the recollection of the many intellectual evenings we have spent together in olden days, while we sat smoking (for you know, James, you were ever fond of a pipe), — Speak for me, aposiopesis, or rather do not, for thou art an unhappy figure and born dumb and of no earthly use but to cut the throat
of a clause !
Write to me now and then, lest I perish. Where is Tennant ? I have not yet answered him : how shall I direct to him ? You inquire after Charles. We see little of him : I believe his spirits are pretty good. Is Brooks at Cambridge ? To him I owe a letter, and I mean to pay my debt.
Ever thine, A. T.
From Hon. Stephen Spring Rice.
Cambrhx^e, November 2jth, 1833. Dear Alfred,
When I received your note some days back I was at first inclined to think it a pity that so much good abuse should be thrown away. Such a happy facility of assertion combined with such apparent sincerity in the expression deserved a better
^ '' Domeship ^ refers to Spedding^s head.
1833] LETTERS FROM CAMBRIDGE. 1 29
fate than being uselessly employed on one so steeled to abuse as myself. O king ! I hope that you will be sufficiently occupied till the 28th with the " Morte d' Arthur." I send Keightley's Fairy Legends and the other books, which it shall be my care to despatch to you to-morrow ; Kemble (Anglo-Saxon Lecturer to the University) sends you to fill up your leisure hours a folio
Saxo-Grammaticus to be jammed into the bowl of your pipe.
Matters are going on here much as usual. I have just written by Peacock's desire to Blakesley to tell him to come here and be a lecturer, a summons which there is no doubt he will obey. Sterling is here still, and is to be at the yearly dinner ^ which takes place among " mankind," and which will come to pass on Monday next. Spedding, Alford, Donne, the two Parishes and Pickering are expected ; so much for eating. I have read Wilhelm Meister for the first time, with which I find as many faults and beauties as every one does. What think you of that ^XvKVTTtKpov performance ? there is another question to burthen your soul with unanswered. If your health is proposed I shall oppose it on the ground of your having been an unworthy member of the Society !! I hope that you will not be able to decipher this scrawl, and so write to ask what it is about I shall send the books to-morrow; you ought to know when to send for them.
Thine ever,
S. E. Spring Rice.
From /. M. Kemble.
GiMBRmGE, November^ 1833. Dearest Alfred,
I write you a line or two by this parcel to tell you what I know is no news to you, that I love you heartily and wish you were with us. There is little stirring here save that we all look with interest for news from you ; I wish you could come and dine with the Apostles on Monday next: I am not sure
1 The " Apostles'" dinner.
T. L Q
130 SOUTUDE AND WORK. [l833
that Donne and Trench will not be with us. We are all pretty well, etc., looking out for more sprigs of the garden (or the g^dener's daughter, for I suppose she was not so imperfect a woman as not to be mother as well as maid and married) ? Is there no gardener's granddaughter ? '' Simeon Stylites *' is said by the prophane, that is the mathematicians Spring Rice and Heath, to be not " the watcher on the pillar to the end," but to the n^ ; and I think this is an improvement ; the more so as it shows your universality off, and marks that you have a touch of mathematics in you : O Alfred ! could you only have made the height of the pillar a geometrical progression ! Give my affec- tionate remembrances to Charles and Fred. Write to me, or what is better yet, come to me.
Ever your most affectionate friend,
J. M. Kemble.
To /. Af. Kemble.
1833. My dear John,
I hope this will find you at Cambridge. J. Heath wrote to me that the books should have been returned by the 21st and I received his note on the 2 1 St. I know not what the fine is, and as to applying for any information even on Cambridge subjects to Cambridge men I hold it vanity. They are so smoke- sotted. Shamefully careless was it to have let these books lie for three weeks in Spring Rice's room. Shameful not to have sent the second volume of Keightley, and hateful the purloining of my album, which I will have found. If the thief be not Douglas himself, it is that luxurious, eye-glass-wearing, unconscienced fellow S. Rice, whom — fill up the chasm as you choose : if the book be returned, let it be with a blessing. Seriously speaking I am disgusted. I am heartily glad
1833] RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES. I31
you have got Beowulf out. Some thoughts, vague ones, I have, of coming up to Cambridge and attending your lectures next term, always provided they be gratis. Good bye, dear old Jack.
Thine ever,
A. Tennyson.
Be so good as to send me the " Morte d'Arthur ^ again.
P.S. Perhaps you would use your paternal authority with the undergraduate whom you may suspect of being the thief. Douglas himself ought not to pass unreproved. What a careless* set you are!
From R. M. Milnes.
After an ''^Apostles' " dinner.
Cambridge, {not dated). To Alfred,
I feel I am getting cross, and as I wish to express in simple sincerity my hope that you will not long defer your promist visit to me, as soon as I return to Yorkshire, which will be in about a fortnight, I shall rock myself on the belief that you will bring or send me something comfortable.
Yours afifectionately,
Richard M. Milnes.
P.S. I suppose nobody writes to you because you never write to nobody. John Heath and many others were full to the brim of enquiries after you, and if you had heard the cheer that followed the health of A. T., the Poet of the Apostles, at oiu* dinner, if you had !
132 SOUTUDE AND WORK. [l833-
Milnes wrote to him later about his Memorials of a tour in Greece which he was about to publish, and received the following answer:
December yd^ 1833.
My dear Milnes,
A letter from you was like a message from the land of shadows. It is so long since I have looked upon and conversed with you, that I will not deny but that you had withdrawn a little into the twilight. Yet you do me a wrong in supposing that I have forgotten you. I shall not easily forget you, for you have that about you which one remembers with pleasure. I am rejoiced to hear that you intend to present us with your Grecian impressions. Your gay and airy mind must have caught as many colours from the landskip you moved through as a flying soap-bubble — a comparison truly somewhat irreverent, yet I meant it not as such ; though I care not if you take it in an evil sense, for is it not owed to you for your three years' silence to me whom you professed to love and care for ? And in the second place, for your expression, " clearing one's mind of Greek thoughts and Greek feelings to make way for something better." It is a sad thing to have a dirty mind full of Greek thoughts and feelings. What an Augean it must have been before the Greek thoughts got there ! To be done with this idle banter, I hope that in your book you have given us much glowing description and little mysticism. I know that you can describe richly and vividly. Give orders to Moxon, and he will take care that the volume is conveyed to me.
Believe me, dear Richard,
Ever thine, A. T.
1834] ^ Wordsworth's opinion. 133
Spedding writes to Thompson (1834) about William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson :
Wordsworth's eyes are better, but not well, nor ever likely to be. Reading inflames them and so does composing. I believe it was a series of Highland sonnets that brought on the last attack, so much worse than he had before. He read me several, that I had not seen nor heard before, many of them admirably good : also a long, romantic wizard and fairy poem, of the time of Merlin and king Arthur, very pretty but not of the first order ^ : but I should not have expected anything so good from him which was so much out of his beat He has not advanced much in his knowledge of Alfred; but he is very modest in his refusal to praise, attributing his want of admiration to a deficiency in himself, whether from the stiffness of old age which cannot accommodate itself to a new style of beauty, or that the compass of his sympathies has been narrowed by flowing too long and strongly in one direction (N.B. He is not answerable for the English that I am writing). But he doubts not that Alfred's style has its own beauty, though he wants the faculty to enter fully into it, alleging as a parallel case the choruses in " Samson Agonistes," the measure of which he has never been able to enjoy, which comes to perhaps as high a compliment as a negative compliment can. He spoke so wisely and graciously that I had half a mind to try him with a poem or two, but that would have been more perhaps than he meant : and indeed it is always so pleasant to hear a distinguished man unaffectedly disclaiming the office of censor, that I think it fair to take him at his word. I have given a copy of Alfred's second volume to Hartley Coleridge, who, I trust, will make more of it. He had only seen it for a few minutes, and was greatly behind the age, though he admitted that A. T. was undoubtedly a man of genius, and was going to say something sharp about the Quarterly in a review of "The Doctor," which he was or is writing for Blackwood. I also sent him yesterday a copy of Charles Tennyson, accompanied with one of my most gentlemanly letters.
In June 1834 there was great distress at Somersby among the Tennysons, because the landlord threatened
* " The Egyptian Maid, or, The Romance of the Water Lily.''
134 SOUTUDE AND WORK. [l834
to cut down Enderby Wood and the Fairy Wood in Holywell, where, under the trees, the finest and earliest snowdrops blow. A hope was uttered that the fairies might haunt the desecrators. The Fairy Wood was left unscathed ; and my father completed his poem, the "Sleeping Beauty"; and warmed to his work because there had been a favourable review of him lately published in far-oflf Calcutta.
In July he visited his friend Heath at Kitlands near Dorking, and thence journeyed with him to Worthing. When they arrived at the little seaside town on a beautiful still night, the sea was calm and golden, and there was a Cuyp-like picture of boys bathing in the glowing sunset, and of gray fishing-boats moored out in the distance. Heath tried to persuade my father to go to Brighton, for he said " The town is worth going to see, and moreover the coast is very fine, an infinitely finer place than Worthing." But my father refused, and in- sisted on returning to his work. He took Kitlands again by the way and had " lonely walks in dark valleys," and by the side of the streams which rise in Leith Hill. In his note-book on one page there is a map of Kitlands and of the surrounding country: on another there is an unpublished fragment on mine host of an ancient hostelry !
Mine Host. {Unpublished)
Yon huddled cloud his motion shifts, Where, by the tavern in the dale.
The thirsty horseman, nodding, lifts The creaming horn of corny ale!
This tavern is their chief resort. For he, whose cellar is his pride,
Gives stouter ale and riper port Than any in the country-side.
1834] VISIT TO KITLANDS. 1 35
Mine host is fat, and gray, and wise. He strokes his beard before he speaks ; '
And when he laughs, his little eyes Are swallow'd in his pamper'd cheeks.
He brims his beaker to the top, With jokes you never heard before,
And sometimes with a twinkling drop, "To those who will not taste it more!'*
The following letter reached him at Kitlands from his sister Emily:
SoMERSBY Rectory,/!/^ 12th, 1834. My dearest Alfred,
I certainly intend to go to Moulsey ^. Would to God I could begin the journey immediately but it is not in my power. You will be sorry to hear that I have been considerably worse
in health since your departure And once or twice indeed I
thought that the chilly hand of death was upon me : however I still exist, tho' reduced again to a great state of weakness. If possible I will journey southward soon. You know, Alfred, the great desire I have to become acquainted with the Hallam family, particularly with Ellen ; she will perhaps be the friend to remove in some degree the horrible feeling of desolation whfch is ever at my heart. I can no longer continue in this deepening grave of tears.. .depend upon it I will do all in my power to go to Moulsey. What is life to me ! if I die (which the Tennysons never do) the effort shall be made. The deep unaffected kind- ness of the Hallams made us all weep... How long do you think of remaining at Kitlands ? It would be pleasant to come while you are there. This however will scarcely be the case consider- ing my journey will commence in about three weeks* time, if by any means I can conjure up resolution.. ..Remember us all to "our Mr Heath" and his brother, and cannot you intimate to the sister how sorry we were not to have been able to avail ourselves, that is Mary and myself, of her kind invitation ? Take
1 The Hallams* house at the time.
136 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [l834
care of thyself that thou mayest return with new health and spirits is the ardent wish of
Thy very affectionate sister, Emily Tennyson. His mother wrote him a letter at the same time :
What kind hearts the Hallams have ! I hope poor Emily will be able to go to Moulsey. The pony got out of the stables and she went with one of the servants to catch it (as Harrison had gone to Homcastle), which made her very ill for some hours, but she is now as well as usual. I wish I could have induced her to begin her journey immediately, but she fancies she has something still to do before she can set out The great lassitude she feels makes her fear she is unequal for such an exertion. I should have liked her so much to be introduced to the Hallams by you ; she also considers this as very desirable. Charles is busy at present with his flock whom he is catechising, but I hope he will be able to travel with her in three weeks' time. I have found the books which Mr Heath mentions. Shall I send them by Mr Spedding ? I have not heard whether or no
he is at Tealby. I hope we shall see him Should you hear
of anything likely to suit Arthur let me know. Remember me to all your friends.
His sister Mary adds a line entreating him
to lend an attentive ear to any music that may be sung, whether by way of chants, hymns, or songs, and to ascertain if Miss Heath will give the name of one or two that most affect his musical organs.
She goes on :
We were rather surprised to hear that the quaint creature Fred has set off to quaff companionless a " beaker full of the warm South," but I suppose a hot sun, south wind and cloudless sky (which constitute a humming day) and all of which are my aversion are all the world to him. And now I must bid thee adieu, hoping to see thee return as blithe as blithe can be. Remember me kindly to all at Kitlands.
When my father returned to Somersby, he had not only Emily to comfort, but also his friend Tennant,
1834] POWER OF SYMPATHY. 1 37
who consulted him about a great sorrow which had befallen him and craved for sympathy.
From R. J. Tennant {after a visit to Somersby).
London UNiVERsnYi August /^th, 1834.
My dear Alfred,
I cannot delay writing to you, and cannot express my earnest gratitude for your friendship....The sight of Somersby, zxidyour kindness have overcome the hard-hearted stubbornness that shut up all my feelings. Forgotten friendships have been revived, and correspondences been renewed that had long since dropped, and home feelings aroused that had slept a long sleep. ...Your very kind letter serves me every day instead of a companion ; the only way in which it is in my power to show gratitude for the repeated and continued kindness I receive from you, is by following your counsel as far as I am able, and keep- ing my own mind in peace.
Ever your affectionate R. J. Tennant.
What strikes me much in this early life of my father is not only his wide power of sympathy, but also his practical good sense, shown especially in the manage- ment of home and of family. For example, now that he knew Tennant wanted an interest in life, and was a good scholar, and that his brother Horatio never looked at a book (his time at Louth School being over), it occurred to him that Horatio might be placed at Blackheath under the care of Tennant, then a master in Blackheath School. The proposition was put before Tennant, with a plain statement, that, although Horatio had more than average power, he had grown rusty and his acquirements were less than they ought to be at his age.
138 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [l834
If he went from the lonely haunts of Somersby to Blackheath, it was hoped that it might be " of advantage to him, for he would see men and he never seemed to care much about boys ; but his observations upon the men he had seen had been very just and penetrating." So off to Blackheath by my father's decision Horatio accordingly went.
The elder brother Frederick was just then in the midst of music at Milan. He wrote a few lines urging my father to publish in the spring. But he would not and could not; his health since Hallam's death had been "variable, and his spirits indifferent." The chief change my father had from the monotony of Somersby life was to drive over to Charles at Tealby, "for Lincolnshire, a beautiful village." Their grandfather George Tennyson, who was beginning to show signs of his approaching end. had left the Tennyson estate of Bayons Manor and migrated to a small house on a sandy moor, because his son Charies Tennyson d'Eyncourt pressed to be in- stalled in the squiredom. " One would have supposed that such a thing," said Frederick, "would have been sufficient to shake the last sands out of his glass." However he lived on his moor comfortably and peaceably : and there died in 1835.
As for his private occupations, my father was still reading his Racine, Moliere, and Victor Hugo among other foreign literature; and had also dipped into Maurice's work Eustace Conway^ which appears to have been in great disfavour, and into Arthur Coningsby by John Sterling, " a dreary book " ; " 'Tis a pretty piece of work, would 'twere done ! " wrote one of the friends. In October 1834, he told Tennant he was busy copying out his " Morte d'Arthur " ; then he posted Spedding some of the new poems for his opinion and Spedding replied as follows :
1834] SPEDDING*S CRITICISMS. 1 39
Mire House, ICeswick, September igth, 1834. My dear Alfred,
Such as it is, this letter will I expect come to you in an independent character, by the good aid of Philip van Artevelde (Henry Taylor), to whom I have a decent excuse for writing. I received by Douglas and John Heath divers of your composi- tions, albeit too few for my appetite : to wit, " Sir Galahad," which enjoys my unlimited admiration. The virgin knight is as beautiful a spirit as Don Quixote in a more beautiful kind, if that could be. Also " Nature, so far as in her lies," one of those pieces which nobody except yourself can write, and I think the most exquisite of an exquisite race. Of the rest I cannot find words to express what and how great is the glory. I have also the alterations of " Oh that 'twere possible," improvements I must admit, tho' I own I did not think that could have been: "Along this glimmering corridor" I had seen before, tho' not as it stands now: and
Fair is her cottage in its place,
Where yon broad water sweetly, slowly glides. It sees itself from thatch to base
Dream in the sliding tides — ^
It is perfectly true; how on earth did you find it out? Last and greatest (tho' not most perfect in its kind) I have re- ceived " The Thoughts of a Suicide * " ; the design is so grand, and the moral, if there is one, so important that I trust you will not spare any elaboration of execution. At all events let me have the rest of it and I will tell you at large what I think ; also as many more as you can supply ; remembering that double letters or parcels will not distress my circumstances. Since I saw you, I have been cultivating my body to the entire exclusion of my soul, which some say is the better part. I have rolled great stones down mountains, but stirred no hidden principle of thought or deed. I have not done an)rthing good ; nor said any good thing. I have written no prose and small verse. Perhaps I was too ambitious, for I endeavoured at nothing lower than Milton's high-learned manner. I sent the small effort to
» " Requiescat." « « The Two Voices."
140 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [l834
Tennant, but that is no reason I should not send it to you, who will laugh at it less and understand it more. After all it is but a fragment of a simile !
Liker that far significant coach that bears The windy artist from his central tower Whither the stars come clustering to suggest The universal secret, she far off Swims on Macadam, etc. etc.
The "far significant coach" is the Cambridge Telegraph, exquisitely described by its property of conveying Professor Airy from the Observatory.
I have not forgotten my promise to write to Charles, but alas how many things are sincerely promised which are nevertheless not faithfully performed.
Ever thine, Jakes Spedding.
To James Spedding.
1834. My dear James,
It may be you have waited some time for a reply, but you haven't waited, so say no more. I have been out or you should have heard from me before this, so, I pray you, make not any little lapse of time that may possibly have slided away into the unrecoverable between the writing of your letter and the receipt of mine precedent for further delay in answering this, for your letters do my moral and intellectual man much good. I am going to town with Emily to-morrow and I expect a token from you on my return. You ask me what I have been doing: I have written several things since I saw you, some emulative of the " 178V koL fipaxv KoX yLeyoKoirpeirh ^ " of Alcaeus, others of the " iKkoyri rtov 6vofidT(ov Kcu rijs (rvpOeaco)^ aKpifieia " of Simonides, one or two epical, but you can scarcely expect me to write
^ Dion. Hal. v. 421.
1834] LETTER ABOUT THE NEW POEMS. I4I
them out for you: for I can scarcely bring myself to write them out for myself, and do you think I love you better than myself? I had thought your Paley had taught you better. 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, tho' it may be that he does not take sufficiently into con- sideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world annther h^art anH ppW 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. But " Philip is a famous man " and makes me 'shamed of my own faults. A propos of faults I have corrected much of my last volume, and if you will send me your copy I would insert my corrections. Heaven knows what Douglas brought you : as for some stanzas about a " Corridor \" I know not whether there be such a poem ; if there be it is very evident you have it not rightly.
I think on second thoughts tho' much against my will I will write thee out a poem, partly because Charles likes it, partly to give a local habitation on this paper and in your brain-piece to what else flies loosely thro' the wind of my own memory like a Sibyl's leaf. Voil^ ! be merciful.
{Here is copied out)
Love thou thy land with love far brought
etc.
It is said one cannot make a silken purse out of a sow's ear, yet have you made a Miltonian out of the Telegraph. " Cynthius aurem vellit " : your far significant
1 See page 146, " The Little Maid."
1/
\..
142 SOUTUDE AND WORK. [l8iJ4-
coacA drew the purse of my mouth like a sow's ear, it was not the wrong sow's ear to lay hold on, for I grinned. Kemble would have said " screamed " but I never scream, I leave that to your vivid men. I dare say you are right about the stanza in "Sir Galahad," who was intended for something of a male counterpart to St Agnes. I cannot write the " Suicide * " for you, 'tis too long, nor " Morte d'Arthur," which I myself think the best thing I have managed lately, for 'tis likewise too long; nor can I write any more at present, for it is much too late.
Angels guard thee, dear Jimmy,
Ever thine, A. T.
P.S. Fragment on British Freedom.
Grave mother of majestic works. From her isle-altar gazing down.
Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks, And, King-like, wears the crown:
Her open eyes desire the truth. The wisdom of a thousand years
Is in them. May perpetual youth Keep dry their light from tears I
1835. From J. M. Heath {the first mention of ^'In Memoriam ").
My dear Alfred,
I sent Julia, on hearing her fears, a copy of your two companions to " Fair Ship \ " which have been a great delight to her, and she seems to have communicated them to some others. " The Xmas * " is indeed most beautiful, most touching, and the
»« Two Voices."
' The sections of 'In Memoriam" which were first written ; see page 109.
1836] HEATH WRITES OF " IN MEMORIAM." I43
latter portions of the " Fair Ship " speak to our hearts indeed. That last verse, is it not the expression of each voiceless thought? But the enjoyment of these will sink deeper yet. I seem some- times as if I could not take in more than one thought at a time, I mean such thoughts as the mind loves to dwell on, and feed upon as it were, etc. etc. etc. I am doubtful how far I am justified in having sent you this, but I could not resist. There are many more people that take an interest in you than you are aware of. Your letter was balm to me, send me more such. I hope we shall see you in the summer.
Your very affectionate friend,
J. M. Heath.
P.S. Thompson cometh, Spedding then, and if you ask what doeth the Spedding, why marry it is this. He bade me say in answer to all such enquiries that he, the said Spedding, was now waiting till he should grow wiser.
To James Spedding.
SoMERSBY Rectory, Feb. 15M, 1835. Midnight
My dear James,
I shall never more have such respect for the lymphatic temperament. A promise has been broken by you, a promise generated betwixt two cigars at Gliddon's, corroborated in Holborn, and repeated in the archway of the Ball and Crown. I did write to you and you have thought me " worthy of sacred silence," but let that pass. I have heard much of your wisdom from Thompson and others, and I confess that, despite of your transgression, I have an inclination to come and see you, and if possible to bring you back with me here. Can I hear that men are wise and not look them in the face } I will come to you as Sheba came to Solomon.
144 SOUTUDE AND WORK. [l835
She traveird far from Indian streams, And he a royal welcome made In ample chambers overlaid
With Lebanonian cedar-beams.
I forget where I read this, and I do not know whether I shall have a royal welcome ; wherefore be no more lymphatic but answer me, for I have sold my medal \ and made money, and would visit you, and if you answer me not I shall — .
Very aflfectionately thine
As thou usest me, A. Tennyson.
To James Spedding.
[Undated.']
My dear James,
I am sorry to disappoint myself (and perhaps in some slight measure you also) by postponing my visit. I am going to be from home for some time but not anywhere in your direction. The birds must sing and the furze bloom for you and Fitzgerald alone, " par nobile fratrum." I sincerely hope you have not put oflF any one else in the expectation of seeing me : tho' I did not state as much in my note, it was only when I first proposed it that I could have come to you. Fortune will perhaps bring me whiter days.
I know not whether you are aware that Charles has become an independent gentleman, living in a big house among chalky wolds at Caistor. His and my great uncle, Sam Turner, to whom he was heir, died some little time ago and left him property, but he complains
^ This, the Chancellor's Medal for << Timbuctoo,^ was given back to him by his cousin Lewis Fytche in 1885.
1836] DISLIKE OF PREMATURE NOTICE. 1 45
that it is at present unavailable, talks of debts to be paid etc. etc.
John Heath writes me word that Mill is going to review me in a new Magazine, to be called the London Review^ and favourably ; but it is the last thing I wish for, and I would that you or some other who may be friends of Mill would hint as much to him. / do not wish to be dragged forward again in any shape before the reading public at present^ particularly on the score of my old poems, most of which I have so cor- rected (particularly " OEnone ") as to make them much less imperfect, which you who are a wise man would own if you had the corrections. I may very possibly send you these some time.
I am in much haste and obliged to conclude, but absent or present.
Believe me
Ever your true friend and admirer, A. T.
Unpublished Poems of this Period (about 1834).
Whispers.
'Tis not alone the warbling woods,
The starr'd abysses of the sky, The silent hills, the stormy floods.
The green that fills the eye — These only do not move the breast;
Like some wise artist. Nature gives,
Thro' all her works, to each that lives A hint of somewhat unexprest. Whatever I see, where'er I move,
These whispers rise, and fall away, Something of pain — of bliss — of Love,
But what, were hard to say.
T. I. 10
146 SOLITUDE AND WORK. [l836
The Little Maid.
Along this glimmering gallery A child she loved to play ;
This chamber she was born in! See, The cradle where she lay I
That little garden was her pride, With yellow groundsel grown !
Those holly-thickets only hide Her grave — a simple stone 1
ALFRED TENNYSON b h J. Spldding, madr at Mi'A
CHAPTER VI.
VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. THE "MORTE D'ARTHUR."
1836-37-
To a friend^ Mrs Neville^ who had lately lost her husband (written between 1830 and 1840, unpublished).
Woman of noble form and noble mind!
Whithersoever thro' the wilderness
Thou bearest from the threshold of thy friends
The sacred sorrows of as pure a heart
As e'er beat time to Nature, take with thee
Our warmest wishes, silent Guardians
But true till Death; and let them go in hope,
Like birds of passage, to return with thee
Some happy Summer morning, when the winds
Are fallen or changed; and, water'd by thy tears,
The two fair lilies growing at thy side
Have slowly prosper'd into stately flowers.
The only Tennyson who, in spite of their grand- father's wish "to make all the brothers parsons \"
* Alluded to in a letter from Frederick Tennyson to John Frere, April i8th, 1832. ** After this long sit however I ought certainly to have some inter- esting passages to tongue. The foremost that presents itself is a crotchet
147 10 — 2
148 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [l836
became a clergjonan, was my uncle Charles. He had been ordained in 1835, and appointed to the curacy of Tealby, the village adjoining Bayons Manor. On May 24th, 1836, he married Louisa Sell wood, my mother's youngest sister.
My mother as a bridesmaid was taken into church by my father. They had rarely been in each other's company since their first meeting in 1830, when the Sellwoods had driven over one spring day from Horn- castle, to call at Somersby Rectory. Arthur Hallam was then staying with the Tennysons ; and asked Emily Sell wood to walk with him in the Fairy Wood. At a turn of the path they came upon my father, who, at sight of the slender, beautiful girl of seventeen in her simple gray dress, moving "like a light across those woodland ways," suddenly said to her: "Are you a Dryad or an Oread wandering here ? " Now, as a bridesmaid, she seemed to him even lovelier:
"O happy bridesmaid, make a happy bride!" And all at once a pleasant truth I learn'd, For, while the tender service made thee weep, I loved thee for the tear thou couldst not hide. And prest thy hand, and knew the press return'd.
My uncle Arthur says : " It was then I first saw your mother, and she read to me Milton's * Comus,' which I had not known before and which I have loved ever since."
My uncle Charles and his bride left for their honey- moon on the Rhine, a tour which was alluded to in " In Memoriam," section xcviii. :
of my grandfather^ that we are all to take orders, myself especially, which puts me into a demisemijoram and causes me to lose time. In order to fill up this note I must add that I expect to be ordained in June, without much reason, for hitherto I have made no kind of preparation, and a pretty parson I shall make Pm thinking..."
1837] SOMERSBY LEFT FOR EPPING FOREST. 1 49
You leave us: you will see the Rhine, And those fair hills I sail'd below, When I was there with him; and go
By summer belts of wheat and vine
To where he breathed his latest breath. That City.
To that city my father would never go, and he gave me a most emphatic " no " when I once proposed a tour there with him.
Under the will of Sam Turner of Caistor, my uncle assumed the name of Turner, settling with his wife at the vicarage of Grasby near Caistor.
The painful parting from Somersby took place in 1837. The patron, Mr Burton, and the Incumbent had allowed the Tennysons to continue in the Rectory thus long. My grandmother had understood that her father-in- law would leave her the estate of Usselby, not far from the old home ; but this was not to be. Not that my grand- mother was destitute; she had her jointure; and my uncle Frederick had been left a property at Grimsby, and all his brothers and sisters had their small " portions." Under these circumstances the family decided that it was best for them to leave the county and live nearer London. My uncle Frederick was in Corfu, and remained there as long as his cousin George d'Eyncourt, who was secretary to Lord Nugent \ kept his appointment. Afterwards he went to Italy and lived near Florence on the Fiesole Road, in a villa planned by Michael Angelo. There, so report ran, "in a large hall, Frederick Tennyson (who was a great lover of music) used to sit in the midst of his forty fiddlers." Thus, his two elder brothers being away, on my father devolved the care of the family and
' High Commbsioner of the Ionian Islands.
150 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [l837
of choosing a new home. The task was by no means easy. The mother " ruled by right of love," but knew nothing of the world. First of all a career had to be found for Horatio, the youngest brother, who wanted to be a soldier. The mother would not hear of this, and he was sent off to try his fortune in Tasmania. High Beech in Epping Forest was the home eventually selected ; and there the Tennysons lived till 1 840, when they went to Tunbridge Wells. Thence they moved in 1 84 1 to Boxley near Maidstone.
Mrs Procter (Barry Cornwall's wife) once said to me :
I have known three great poets, Wordsworth, Browning and your father, and when they chose they could be more prosaic and practical than anybody on earth.
My father certainly proved his practical turn at this time in furnishing High Beech, for they say that he " did not even forget the kitchen utensils: and that throughout the furniture was pretty and inexpensive." The house and park were pleasant enough. There was a pond in the park on which in winter my father might be seen skating, sailing about on the ice in his long blue cloak.
He liked the nearness of London, whither he resorted to see his friends Spedding, Fitzgerald, Heath, Kemble, Tennant and others: but he writes that he could not often stay in town even for a night, his mother being in such a nervous state that he did not like to leave her. " The light of London flaring like a dreary dawn " was an especial admiration of his, during the evening journeys between London and High Beech. When he could leave home he would often visit in Lincolnshire, and stay both at his brother's vicarage and at the Sellwoods' in Homcastle. My mother and he were then quasi- engaged but were not able to marry owing to want of funds. They were not married until 1850, when his poems brought him a competency.
1835] MY father's OPINION OF WORDSWORTH. I5I
The study at High Beech, where he worked at his 1842 volume, was not the top attic, according to his usual preference, but a large room over the dining- room, with a bay window, red curtains, and a Clytie on a pedestal in the corner.
The "faithful Fitz^" writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake), he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume, the " Morte d'Arthur," " The Day-Dream," " The Lord of Burleigh," " Dora," and " The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of a MS "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, * when all the house was mute.' " Fitzgerald continues :
Spedding's father and mother were both alive ; and his father, who was of a practical turn, and had seen enough of poets in Shelley and Coleridge (perhaps in Wordsworth also), whom he remembered about the Lakes, rather resented our making so serious a business of verse-making, though he was so wise and charitable as to tolerate everything and everybody, except poetry and poets. He was jealous of his son James applying his g^eat talents, which might have been turned to public and practical use, to such nonsense.
My father read them a great deal of Wordsworth, "the dear old fellow," as he called him. "The Yews of Borrowdale," "The Simplon Pass," the sonnet be- ginning " Two Voices," " The Solitary Reaper," " Peele Castle," the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," " The Fountain," were among his favourites. Fitzgerald notes again :
I remember A. T. saying he remembered the time when he could see nothing in "Michael" which he now read us in admiration; though he thought Wordsworth often clumsy
* Edward Fitzgerald.
i
152 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [l836
and diffuse. There was no end of " This Thorn " in the piece that bears the name : ** such hammering to set a scene for so small a drama."
My father also read Keat& and Milton : saying that " Lycidas " was " a test of any reader's poetic instinct," and that " Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would ( have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all (tho' his I blank verse was poor), and that there is something magic V. and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote." Then, perhaps in his weaker moments, he used to think Shakespeare greater in his sonnets than in his plays. " But he soon returned to the thought which is indeed the thought of all the world. He would have seemed to me to be reverting for a moment to the great sorrow of his own mind ; and in that peculiar phase of mind he found the sonnets a deeper expression of the never-to-be-forgotten love which he felt, more than any of the many moods of many minds which appear among Shakespeare's dramas ^"
The three friends went to Ambleside together, but Spedding was obliged to leave Fitzgerald and my father there, and go home on business. Fitzgerald says :
Alfred Tennyson staid with me at Ambleside. I will say no more than that the more I see of him, the more cause I have to think him g^eat. His little humours and g^mpinesses were so droll that I was always laughing. I must, however, say further, that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the overshadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own.
He adds a note about a row on Windermere with my father :
Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a week from dear Spedding's (Mirehouse), at the
* Jowett.
ALFRED TESt 'SON
ffom d SUici A( f^warj FingtraU
1886] HARTLEY COLERIDGE. 1 53
end of May 1835, resting on our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, Alfred quoted from the lines he had lately read us from the MS of " Morte d' Arthur " about the lonely lady of the lake and Excalibur —
Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills.
u
Not bad that, Fitz, isit^?"
This kind of remark he would make when reading his own or others' poetry when he came to lines that he particularly admired, from no vanity but from a pure feeling of artistic pleasure. "The Lord of Burleigh" was also read from MS and Fitz writes : " I remember the author doubting if it were not too familiar, with its
'Let us see these handsome houses,*
etc. for public taste. * But a sister,' A. T. said, ' had liked it'; we never got it out of our heads from the first hearing ; and now is there a greater favourite where English is spoken?" My father and Fitzgerald then had a contest as to who could invent the weakest Words- worthian line imaginable. Although Fitzgerald claimed this line, my father declared that he had composed it —
A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman.
While my father was in the Lake Country he fell in with Hartley Coleridge, who discussed Pindar with him, calling Pindar " The Newmarket poet." " Hartley was wonderfully eloquent," my father said, "and I suspect resembled his father in that respect. I liked Hartley, * Massa ' Hartley. I remember that on one occasion Hartley was asked to dine with the family of a stiff Presbyterian clergyman, residing in the Lake district. The party sat a long time in the drawing-room waiting for dinner. Nobody talked. At last Hartley could
» E. F. G., MS Note.
154 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [l836
stand it no longer, he jumped up from the sofa, kissed the clergyman's daughter, and bolted out of the house. He was very eccentric, a sun-faced little man. He once went a walking tour with some friends. They suddenly missed him, and could not find him anywhere, and did not see him again for six weeks, when he emerged from some inn. He was a loveable little fellow."
Sonnet to Alfred Tennyson^ after meeting him
for the first time.
Long have I known thee as thou art in song, And long enjoyed the perfume that exhales From thy pure soul, and odour sweet entails And permanence on thoughts that float along The stream of life, to join the passive throng Of shades and echoes that are Memory's being; Hearing, we hear not, and we see not, seeing, If Passion, Fancy, Faith, move not among The never-present moments of reflection. Long have I viewed thee in the crystal sphere Of verse, that like the Beryl makes appear Visions of hope, begot of recollection. Knowing thee now, a real earth-treading man. Not less I love thee and no more I can.
Hartley Coleridge.
Of this visit Spedding wrote to Thompson :
Alfred left us about a week since, homeward bound, but meaning to touch at Brookfield's on his way. The weather has been much finer since he went ; certainly, while he was here, our northern sun did not display himself to advantage. Nevertheless I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed wh(5 did not know his almost personal dislike of the present, whatever it may be. Hartley Coleridge is mightily taken with him ; and after the fourth bottom of gin, deliberately thanked Heaven (under me, I believe, or me under Heaven, I forget which) for having brought them acquainted.
1836] LETTERS FROM SPEDDING AND FITZGERALD. 1 55
Said Hartley was busy with an article on " Macbeth," to appear (the vegetable spirits permitting) in the next Blackwood. He confessed to a creed touching Destiny which was new to me ; denying Free- Will (if I understood him right) in toto ; but at the same time maintaining that man is solely and entirely answerable for whatever evil he does, not merely that he is to suffer for it but that he is answerable for it, which I do not. I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount, he would and would not^ (sulky one), although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him ; and would have been more so, had the state of his household permitted, which I am sorry to say is full of sickness. ...Alfred despises the Citation and Exam, of W. Shakespeare'.
From Edward Fitzgerald. [After the visit at the Speddings\ Mirehouse.)
London, July and, 1835. Dear Tennyson,
I suppose you have heard of the death of James Spedding's sister-in-law : for my part I only came to know of it a day or two ago : having till then lived out of communication with any one who was likely to know of such things. After leaving you at Ambleside, I stayed a fortnight at Manchester, and then went to Warwick, where I lived a king for a month. Warwickshire is a noble shire : and the Spring being so late, I had the benefit of it through most of the month of June. I sometimes wished for you, for I think you would have liked
it well I have heard you sometimes say that you are boundl
by the want of such and such a sum, and I vow to the Lord that I could not have a greater pleasure than transferring it to you on such occasions ; I should not dare to say such a thing to a small man : but you are not a small man assuredly : and even if you do not make use of my offer, you will not be offended but put it to the right account It is very difficult to persuade people in this world that one can part with a banknote without a pang. It is one of the most simple things I have ever done to talk thus to you, I believe : but here is an end ; and be charitable to me.
^ He said that he did not wish to '< obtrude himself on the great man at Rydal."
* This refers to Landor^s Essay so named.
156 VISITS TO THE LARES AND ELSEWHERE. [l836
Edgeworth* is a wonderful man, but I shall be very serious
with him lest he should wean you from indulging in quaint and wonderful imaginations, and screw you up too tightly to moral purpose. If this sentence is unintelligible to you, I will console you with one that is as clear as daylight. Your muse has penetrated into France : there has been a review of your poems in a paper called the Voleur^ in which you are called — guess ^y what! — "Jeune Enthousiaste de Ticole gracieuse de Thomas Moore " — this I think will make you laugh and is worth postage. Now I have told you all that I have in my head : it is fortunate that the sheet of paper is just spacious enough for my out- pourings. The " Morte d' Arthur " has been much in my mouth : audibly : round Warwick.
I am yours very truly, E. Fitzgerald.
P. S. When I was at Manchester, I bought a small Dante for myself : and, liking it well, the same for you : for I had never seen the edition before, and I dare say you have not. It is small but very clearly printed: with little explanations at the foot of each page, very welcome to me : the proper price was ten shillings but I only gave three.
Leigh Hunt writes :
4 Upper Cheyne Road, Chelsea. 1835.
The Prince Arthur^ which I should have brought with me, I will send to-morrow or next day by a messenger ; and the rest shall reach you as quickly as may be. Meanwhile may I venture to hope that my two non-appearances will not hinder me from having another invitation some day, or yourself from coming to see me ? Carlyle expresses the pleasure he should
have in meeting you here some evening Shall I hope to
see you at Carlyle's lecture on Monday ?
1 Nephew of Maria Edgeworth, the << Little Frank *^ of the Parents Assistant.
' This copy of Malory I have still in my possession, a small book for the pocket, published 181 6, by Walker and Edwards, and much used by my father.
1886] LORD Northampton's annual. 157
From jR. M. Milnes.
Your brief was infallibly pleasant. I shall wait for you in December. If you like, we will have " Freezetown " (Fryston) all to ourselves and you may smoke while I play the organ. Now be a good boy and do as you're told. Lord Northampton is getting up a charity book of poetry for the destitute family of a man of letters, bom in the dead letter office, and he earnestly prays you to contribute not your mite but your might to it I have half promised you will gfive him something pretty consider- able, for the fault of the book will be that the contributions are not as great in dimension as in name. He has got original things of Wordsworth, Southey, Miss Bailey, R. M. M. etc. I will love you more and more therefore if you will send some jewels directed to the Marquis of Northampton, Castle Ashby, Northampton, as soon as convenient. Your " St Agnes ^ " looks funny between Lord Londonderry and Lord W. Lennox, God her aid ! I like Brookfield's sonnet eminently
Yours affectionately, R. M. Milnes.
P. S. You know your contribution will be at your disposal to do what you like with when the book is sold, i.e. in a year or so.
To R. M. Mihtes^.
December^ 1836.
Dear Richard,
As I live eight miles from my post-town and only correspond therewith about once a week, you must not wonder if this reaches you somewhat late. Your former brief I received, though some six days behind time, and stamped with the postmarks of every little market-town in the country, but I did not think it demanded an immediate answer, hence my silence.
* "St Agnes," published in the Keepsake (1837), pp. 247-48, edited by Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley.
' Quoted in Wemyss Reid's Life of Lord Houghton.
158 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [l837
That you had promised the Marquis I would write for him something exceeding the average length of " Annual compositions " ; that you had promised him I would write at all : I took this for one of those elegant fictions with which you amuse your aunts of evenings, before you get into the small hours when dreams are true. Three summers back, provoked by the incivility of editors, I swore an oath that I would never again have to do with their vapid books, and I brake it in the sweet face of Heaven when I wrote for Lady What's-her- name Wortley. But then her sister wrote to Brookfield and said she (Lady W.) was beautiful, so I could not help it. But whether the Marquis be beautiful or not, I don't much mind ; if he be, let him give God thanks and make no boast. To write for people with prefixes to their names is to milk he-goats; there is neither honour nor profit. Up to this moment I have not even seen The Keepsake : not that I care to see it, for the want of civility decided me not to break mine oath again for man nor woman, and how should such a modest man as I see my small name in collocation with the great ones of Southey, Wordsworth, R. M. M., etc., and not feel myself a barndoor fowl among peacocks? Goodbye.
Believe me always thine,
A. T.
Milnes was angry at the refusal, and my father answered him banteringly again:
/an. 10/54, 1837 ^
Why what in the name of all the powers, my dear Richard, makes you run me down in this fashion ? Now is my nose out of joint, now is my tail not only curled
* Quoted in Wemyss Reid^s Lt/e of Lord Houghton.
1837] LETTER TO MILNES. 1 59
SO tight as to lift me oflf my hind legs like Alfred Crow- quill's poodle, but fairly between them. Many sticks are broken about me. I am the ass in Homer. I am blown. What has so jaundiced your good-natured eyes as to make them mistake harmless banter for insolent
irony : harsh terms applicable only to who big as
he is, sits to all posterity astride upon the nipple of literary dandyism, and " takes her milk for gall " ? " In- solent irony" and "piscatory vanity," as if you had been writing to St Anthony, who converted the soft souls of salmon; but may St Anthony's fire consume all misapprehension, the spleen-born mother of five- fold more evil on our turnip-spheroid than is malice aforethought.
Had I been writing to a nervous, morbidly-irritable man, down in the world, stark-spoiled with the staggers of a mis-managed imagination and quite opprest by fortune and by the reviews, it is possible that I might have halted to find expressions more suitable to his case ; but that you, who seem at least to take the world as it comes, to do£E it, and let it pass, that you, a man every way prosperous and talented, should have taken pet at my unhappy badinage made me lay down my pipe and stare at the fire for ten minutes, till the stranger fluttered up the chimney ! You wish that I had never written that passage. So do I, since it seems to have given such offence. Perhaps you likewise found a stumbling- block in the expression "vapid books," as the angry inversion of four commas seems so intimate. But are not Annuals vapid ? Or could I possibly mean that what you or Trench or De Vere chose to write therein must be vapid ? I thought you knew me better than even to insinuate these things. Had I spoken the same things to you laughingly in my chair, and with my own emphasis, you would have seen what they really meant, but coming to read them peradventure in a fit of indi-
l6o VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [l837
gestion, or with a slight matutinal headache after your Apostolic symposium you subject them to such mis- interpretation as, if I had not sworn to be true friend to you till my latest death-ruckle, would have gone far to make me indignant. But least said soonest mended ; which comes with peculiar grace from me after all this verbiage. You judge me rightly in supposing that I would not be backward in doing a really charitable deed. I will either bring or send you something for your Annual. It is very problematical whether I shall be able to come and see you as I proposed, so do not return earlier from your tour on my account ; and if I come, I should only be able to stop a few days, for, as I and all my people are going to leave this place very shortly never to return, I have much upon my hands. But whether I see you or no.
Believe me always thine affectionately,
A. Tennyson.
I have spoken with Charles. He has promised to contribute to your Annual^. Frederick will, I daresay, follow his example. See now whether I am not doing my best for you, and whether you had any occasion to threaten me with that black "Anacaona*" and her cocoa- shod coves of niggers. I cannot have her strolling about the land in this way. It is neither good for her repu- tation nor mine. When is Lord Northampton's book to be published, and how long may I wait before I send anything by way of contribution ?
" O that 'twere possible," afterwards the foundation of " Maud," was sent to Lord Northampton. Fitzgerald also notes that in this year my father wrote a poem on
» Thi TnbuU. « p. 56.
1837] THE QUEEN OF THE ISLES. l6l
the Queen's accession, " of which the burden was * Here's a health to the Queen of the Isles.' " One stanza I have heard my father repeat :
{Unpublished.)
That the voice of a satisfied people may keep A sound in her ears like the sound of the deep, Like the sound of the deep when the winds are asleep ; Here's a health to the Queen of the Isles.
A fragment of a poem about Mablethorpe he wrote
then, and gave in 1850 to the Manchester Athenaum
Album :
Mablethorpe.
Here often when a child I lay reclined :
I took delight in this fair strand and free ; Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships all seem'd to be. And here again I come, and only find
The drain-cut level of the marshy lea. Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind.
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.
The following sonnet was also preserved, which he wrote at the end of 1837 or the beginning of 1838.
Sonnet. ( Unpublished. )
To thee with whom my true affections dwell. That I was harsh to thee, let no one know ; It were, O Heaven, a stranger tale to tell Than if the vine had borne the bitter sloe. Tho' I was harsh, my nature is not so : A momentary cloud upon me fell : My coldness was mistimed like summer-snow. Cold words I spoke, yet loved thee warm and well. Was I so harsh ? Ah dear, it could not be. Seem'd I so cold ? what madness moved my blood
1 62 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [1888
To make me thus belie my constant heart That watch't with love thine earliest infancy, Slow-ripening to the grace of womanhood, Thro' every change that made thee what thou art ?
It was in the latter part of 1837 or the beginning of 1838 that he appears to have first become known in America, Professor Rolfe, who has kindly interested himself in the matter, writes to me that R. W. Emerson somehow made acquaintance with the 1830 and 1832 volumes about that time and delighted in lending them to his friends.
Emerson suggested a reprint of the volumes, and Longfellow, brother of the poet, showed Prof. Rolfe a letter from Messrs C. C. Little & Co. of Boston ad- dressed to the poet and dated April 27th, 1838, stating that they intended to publish the reprint; but for some reason this plan was not carried out.
During some months of 1837 my father was deeply immersed in Pringle's Travels^ and Lyell's Geology: and from Pringle he got the image of the hungry lion used in his simile in " Locksley Hall ":
Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher.
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly- dying fire.
He received the following letter from Leigh Hunt, dated July 31st:
My dear Sir
Many thanks for your kind letter. It delights me to think you should find anything to like in my verses, especially " Paganini." I always fancy that if ever I write anything worthy of the name of poetry, it is when I write about music. Your
1838] MISS BARRETT. 1 63
communication alas! came too late for the book in question; but the editor shall know of it, and will doubtless be gratified that you have written. I wish to send you a copy of the first number of the new series of a magazine (the Monthly Repository) of which I myself have become editor ; but have not the face to put you to the expense of receiving it at such a distance. Will you drop me a word to say whether I can forward it to any intermediate place of communication, and will you at the same time look into your desk and see if you can oblige me with a few verses and your name to them^ for my new adventure ? You will see in some verses of mine, in the number I speak of, that I have taken a liberty with said name, in speaking of a fair and no unworthy imitator of yours, a Miss Barrett^, who really has sparks of the " faculty divine," but what I say, as you will easily believe, has all due respect and admiration at the bottom of it ; as indeed every one knows who knows anything about you, or about what I say of you. Therefore do not hesitate to send me a Sibylline leaf if you can, and be sure I ask it for your honour and glory as well as my own advantage. I want my magazine to be such a magazine as was never seen before, every article worth something, though / say it that shouldn't, and I believe you know my gallant wish to be a sort of Robin Hood of an editor, with not a man in my company that does not beat his leader. A sonnet — a fragment — anything will be welcome, most especially if you put your name to it ; and therefore for the sake of poetry and my love of it, again I say, oblige me if you can; and also send instantly because time begins to press.
Ever truly yours, Leigh Hunt.
P. S. The magazine shall come away the instant I hear from you where to send it
In the following extract from an unpublished letter of Leigh Hunt's to S. C Hall an interesting criticism is given of my father and his brothers Frederick and Charles :
I do not know the birth, parentage and education of Tenny- son. I am pretty sure however that he is not long come from
^ Afterwards Mrs Barrett Browning.
II — 2
164 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [l838
Trinity College, Cambridge, and I believe him to be nephew of Tennyson d'Eyncourt, the member for Lambeth, and son of a clergyman (the last however I know still more dimly than the rest). He has a brother (Charles) whom you ought to know, if you do not know him already.
I will send you his vol. of Sonnets to-morrow, together with the only vol. which I have at home (I find) of Alfred's. If it is not the one you want, I will see who has got the other. Charles is not equal to Alfred, but still partakes of the genuine faculty. He has a graceful luxury but combining less of the spiritual with it, which, I suppose, is the reason why he has become clergyman ! I was fearful of what he would come to by certain migivings in his poetry and a want of the active poetic faith.
There is also another brother, perhaps less inspired than Charles and who has only put forth a sonnet or so in public, Frederick, but still partaking of the right vein ; and I think I have heard there are two of the sisters poetical! Here is a nest of nightingales for you ! ***
The materials of the noblest poetry are abundant in hint (Alfred), and we trust will not find any too weak comer in the sensitiveness of his nature to oppress him with their very exuberance.
Mr Gladstone, as is well-known, was Arthur Hallam's school friend, and on this account my father had a romantic desire to see him; and so called upon him about this time. I wrote to Mr Gladstone for some details of their early intercourse and he kindly replied:
10 Downing Street, Whttehall, October^ 1892.
My DEAR Hallam,
I am afraid that I shall have to adjourn any attempt to record my intercourse with your father until after my resigna- tion of my present office, and even then I fear it might have to compete with the demands of my unfinished work.
I do not think that at any time during the last forty years I have ever found myself able when in office to give continuous thoughts on any subject outside public affairs. I will however allow myself the pleasure of referring to the first occasion on
1888] FIRST MEETING WITH MR GLADSTONE. 1 65
which I saw him. It was about the year 1837, when he called on me in Carlton Gardens. This was an unexpected honour, for I had no other tie with him than having been in earlier life the friend of his friend, to whom he afterwards erected so splendid a literary monument. I cannot now remember parti- culars, but I still retain the liveliest impression of both the freedom and kindness with which he conversed with me during a long interview.
I am greatly pleased to hear that you have undertaken the " Life," — doubtless an arduous task, but one to which your titles are multiple as well as clear.
Believe me most sincerely yours,
W. E. Gladstone.
The years spent in strenuous labour and self-educa- tion, and his engagement to Emily Sellwood, had again braced my father for the struggle of life. The current of his mind no longer ran constantly in the channel of mourn- ful memories and melancholy forebodings. During this autumn of 1838 he sought out "fresh woods and pastures new " in Torquay, where he wrote his " Audley Court." His friends had not yet grasped the change in the tenor of his thoughts and still tried to cheer him. " Go and live at Cambridge," said Venables. " You might perceive, if you had any doubt about it, when you were last there how great a pleasure it was to us all to see you, and how little trouble to provide for you. Now you would be more at home there than you were then after so long an absence, and you can get books innumerable, and smoke and talk, or not talk; and make poetry and commit it to surer records than the leaves of which so many are lost. Do not continue to be so careless of famey and of influence'^ Or again he advised my father to go and work in Prague, where he would receive new impressions and a new stimulus to the imagination.
" I almost wonder that you with your love of music and tobacco do not go and live in some such place."
1 66 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND ELSEWHERE. [1888
Yet my father paid heed to none of these invitations, but went his own way. He had abundant materials now for publication. He had made friends in London, and when he published again he would start as a well- known man, with the certainty that he could not be overlooked and that by many he would be appreciated. He was on the whole happy in his life, and looked forward to still better days.
Hope, a poising eagle, burnt Above the unrisen morrow.
He must earn a livelihood on which to marry. He would arrange his material and give as perfect a volume as he could to the world. " I felt certain of one point then," he said: "if I meant to make any mark at all, it must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things except * King Arthur' had been done." Another fact also began to dawn upon him, that if he never published again, even that which he had published " would be taken out of its napkin and would be given to him who had published ten volumes."
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1 66 VISITS TO THE LAKES AND FT^FWHFBI?
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CHAPTER VII.*
EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS TO EMILY SELLWOOD.
[These extracts, that follow chronological order, are made from a series of letters from my father to my mother extending over three years. I have not felt able to include the many passages which would show the intensity of feeling expressed in these letters, but have burnt the correspondence according to my £ather^s directions.]
1838-1840.
1838. I saw from the high road thro' Hagworth- ingham the tops of the elms on the lawn at Somersby beginning to kindle into green. Do you remember sitting with me there on the iron garden chair one day when I had just come from London ? It was earlier in the year than now. I have no reason for asking except that the morning three years back seems fresh and pleasant ; and you were in a silk pelisse, and I think I read some book with you.
I dare not tell how high I rate humour, which is generally most fruitful in the highest and most solemn human spirits. Dante is full of it, Shakespeare, Cer- vantes, and almost all the greatest have been pregnant with this glorious power. You will find it even in the Gospel of Christ.
Copyright, 2897, by The MacmiUan Company.
167
1 68 EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS TO EMILY SELLWOOD, [l839
1839. " The Stem daughter of the Voice of God," unclothed with the warmth of the feelings, is as impotent to convert as the old Stoicism,
Wells. The light of this world is too full of refrac- tions for men ever to see one another in their true positions. The world is better than it is called, but wrong and foolish. The whole framework seems wrong, which in the end shall be found right.
Bitterness of any sort becomes not the sons of Adam, still less pride, for they are in that talk of theirs for the most part but as children babbling in the market-place.
High Beech. I have been at this place (High Beech in Epping Forest) all the year, with nothing but that muddy pond in prospect, and those two little sharp- barking dogs.
Perhaps I am coming to the Lincolnshire coast, but I scarcely know. The journey is so expensive and I am so poor.
The far future has been my world always.
I shall never see the Eternal City, nor that dome, the wonder of the world ; I do not think I would live there if I could, and I have no money for touring.
Mablethorpe. I am not so able as in old years to commune alone with Nature. I am housed at Mr Wildman's, an old friend of mine in these parts: he and his wife are two perfectly honest Methodists. When
1889] JOHN KEMBLE. 1 69
I came, I asked her after news, and she replied : " Why, Mr Tennyson, there's only one piece of news that I know, that Christ died for all men." And I said to her : " That is old news, and good news, and new news " ; wherewith the good woman seemed satisfied. I was half-yesterday reading anecdotes of Methodist ministers, and liking to read them too... and of the teaching of Christ, that purest light of God.
That made me count the less of the sorrows when I caught a glimpse of the sorrowless Eternity.
A good woman is a wondrous creature, cleaving to the right and the good in all change ; lovely in her youthful comeliness, lovely all her life long in comeliness of heart.
London. There is no one here but John Kemble with whom I dined twice ; he is full of burning indig- nation against the Russian policy and what he calls the moral barbarism of France : likewise he is striving against what he calls the " mechanic influence of the age and its tendency to crush and overpower the spiritual in man," and indeed what matters it how much man knows and does if he keeps not a reverential looking upward } He is only the subtlest beast in the field.
We must bear or we must die. It is easier perhaps to die, but infinitely less noble. The immortality of man disdains and rejects the thought, the immortality of man to which the cycles and the aeons are as hours and as days.
, 1 70 EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS TO EMILY SELLWOOD. [I88O
"Why has God created souls knowing they would sin and suffer ?" a question unanswerable. Man is greater than all animals because he is capable of moral good and evil, tho* perhaps dogs and elephants, and some of the higher mammalia have a little of this capability. God might have made me a beast ; but He thought good to give me power, to set Good and Evil before me that I might shape my own path. The happiness, resulting from this power well exercised, must in the end exceed the mere physical happiness of breath- ing, eating, and sleeping like an ox. Can we say that God prefers higher happiness in some to a lower happi- ness in all ? It is a hard thing that if I sin and fail I should be sacrificed to the bliss of the Saints. Yet what reasonable creature, if he could have been askt before- hand, would not have said, " Give me the metaphysical power ; let me be the lord of my decisions ; leave physical quietude and dull pleasure to lower lives." All souls methinks would have answered thus, and so had men suffered by their own choice, as now by the necessity of being born what they are, but there is no answer to these questions except in a great hope of universal good : and even then one might ask, why has God made one to suffer more than another, why is it not meted equally to all ? Let us be silent, for we know nothing of these things, and we trust there is One who knows all. God cannot be cruel. If he were, the heart could only find relief in the wildest blasphemies, which would cease to be blasphemies. God must be all powerful, else the soul could never deem Him worthy of her highest worship. Let us leave it therefore to God, as to the wisest. Who knows whether revelation be not itself a veil to hide the glory of that Love which we could not look upon without marring our sight, and our onward progress ? If it were proclaimed as a truth " No man shall perish : all shall live, after a certain time shall have gone by, in bliss with God "
1889] "THE DREAMS OF SPACE AND TIME." I7I
such a truth might tell well with one or two lofty spirits, but would be the hindrance of the world.
High Beechy July loth. What a thunderstorm we had the other night ! I wonder whether it was so bad at H — . It lasted the whole night and part of the previous after- noon. Lewis Fytche, who was with us then, was looking out of my window about half-past 1 1 o'clock, and saw a large fireball come up the valley from Waltham till it seemed to come quite over our pond : it then according to his account grew on a sudden amazingly large. How large ? I askt him : he said, " like a great balloon, and burst with an explosion like fifty batteries of cannon." I was so sorry not to have seen it, for it was a thing to remember; but I had just gone to my mother's room: she was grovelling on the floor in an extremity of fear when the clap came ; upon which she cried out, " Oh ! I will leave this house : the storms are very bad here," and F — who is here burst out weeping. Such a scene, almost ludicrous in its extremes.
I have been engaged in packing books. I have a good many. I am afraid I shall be obliged to sell them, for I really do not know where to stow them and the house at Tunbridge is too small, a mere mouse-trap.
All life is a school, a preparation, a purpose : nor can we pass current in a higher college, if we do not undergo the tedium of education in this lower one.
Annihilate within yourself these two dreams of Space and Time. To me often the far-off world seems nearer
172 EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS TO EMILY SELLWOOD [l839
than the present, for in the present is always something unreal and indistinct, but the other seems a good solid planet, rolling round its green hills and paradises to the harmony of more steadfast laws. There steam up from about me mists of weakness, or sin, or despondency, and roll between me and the far planet, but it is there still.
Dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood. A known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed does more for me than many an old friend that I know. An old park is my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever.
Sculpture is particularly good for the mind: there is a height and divine stillness about it which preaches peace to our stormy passions. Methinks that, in looking upon a great statue like the Theseus (maim'd and defaced as it is), one becomes as it were Godlike, to feel things in the Idea.
There is the glory of being loved, for so have we "laid great bases for Eternity."
Thro' darkness and storm and weariness of mind and of body is there built a passage for His created ones to the gates of light.
That world of perfect chrysolite, a pure and noble heart.
1839] TOUR IN WALES. I 73
Aberystwith. I cannot say I have seen much worth the trouble of the journey, always excepting the Welsh- women's hats which look very comical to an Eng- lish eye, being in truth men's hats, beavers, with the brim a little broad, and tied under the chin with a black ribband. Some faces look very pretty in them. It is remarkable how fluently the little boys and girls can speak Welsh, but I have seen no leeks yet, nor shot any cheeses. This place, the Cambrian Brighton, pleases me not,... a sea certainly to-day of a most lovely blue, but with scarce a ripple. Anything more unlike the old Homeric " much-sounding " sea I never saw. Yet the bay is said to be tempestuous. O for a good Mablethorpe breaker ! I took up this morning an un- happy book of English verse by a Welshman, and read therein that all which lies at present swampt fathom- deep under the bay of Carnarvon was long ago in the twilight of history a lovely lowland, rich in woods, thick with cities. One wild night a drunken man, who was a sort of clerk of the drains and sewers in his time, opened the dam-gates and let in the sea, and Heaven knows how many stately palaces have ever since been filled with polyps and sea-tangle. How many gentlemen discussing after-dinner politics of that day were surprised by the precocious entrance of lobster before supper!: How many young ladies playing at their pre-historic pianos ended some warm love-song of life in a quavering swan-song of death !
I require quiet, and myself to myself, more than any man when I write.
Barmouth. Barmouth is a good deal prettier place than Aberystwith, a flat sand shore, a sea with breakers, looking Mablethorpelike, and sand hills, and close behind
174 EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS TO EMILY SELLWOOD. [I88O
them huge crags and a long estuary with cloud-capt hills running up as far as Dolgelly, with Cader Idris on one side.
The most beautiful thing I saw this time in Wales — Llanberis lakes. (" Edwin Morris '* was written there.)
In letters^ words too often prove a bar of hindrance instead of a bond of union.
London. My friends have long since ceased to write, knowing me to be so irregular a correspondent. A brief and terse style suits the man, but the woman is well when she deals in words.
So much to do and so much to feel in parting from the house. Such a scene of sobbing and weeping was there on Monday morning among the servants at Beech Hill, and cottagers' daughters, as that cockney residence has seldom witnessed, perhaps never since its stones were cemented and trowelled. There were poor Milnes wringing her hands and howling, Ann Green swallowing her own tears with exclamations of such pathos as would have moved the heart of a whinstone, and other villagers all joining in the chorus, as if for some great public calamity. Finding we had human hearts, though we lived in a big house, they thought it all the harder that they were to lose us so soon. We drove the other day to see a Captain Pellew, who had drawn several sketches of the Himala mountains. Capt. P. said that in the early morning when all the hills were wrapt in blackness, the sharp snow-peaks shine out like rosy lamps hung high up in heaven, and apparently having no connection with
1840] VISIT TO WARWICK. 1 75
this earth. A man who had just visited the Alps was with him there, and he said " the Himala was just twice as magnificent."
Warwick. 1840. I got into the third class of carriages in the train to Leicester. It is a carriage entirely open, without seats, nothing but a rail or two running across it, something like pens of cattle.. ..Tho' we did not move very quickly, yet it was Hker flying than anything else.... I learnt some curious lessons in per- spective, e.g. the two rails on the road were always drawn together with the greatest rapidity. I stopt last night at Leicester, and came on here (to Warwick) this morning by a slow mail. On driving into Warwick, by great chance I happened to have my glass in my eye and perceived my friend, Edward Fitzgerald, taking his walk on the pav6 towards Leamington. I stopt the coach, and he got up, and we drove to the George here, and had an evening together. Kenilworth looked grand in the distance. I think of going over with Fitz to-morrow. Warwick not to be seen till Saturday as the family are there. Almost afraid I cannot stop as long, as it is very expensive being at an inn. Warwick Castle looked grand and black among its woods from the bridge this evening, a nightingale was singing, and rooks were cawing, and there was moreover the noise of a waterfall.
London, I went thro' Warwick Castle. It is certainly a noble specimen of old feudalism, and the views from the windows would be of unrivalled loveliness if the river were only clearer. I and Fitzgerald also (climbed) up Guy's tower, and had " large prospect " of the surrounding country : but nothing pleased me better on the whole than two paintings I saw in the castle : one, an Admiral van
176 EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS TO EMILY SELLWOOD. [l840
Tromp by Rembrandt, the other Macchiavelli by Titian, both wonderful pictures, but the last grand beyond all words. We strayed about the gardens.... After wards we went to Stratford and saw Shakespeare's monument. I should not think it can be a good likeness. That foolish fellow painted it white all over, and served poor Johnny Combe, who lies on a monument near, in the same way. I suppose from a notion that so painted they would look more classic, but the monuments all about were gilded and painted, and so were theirs. By which fancy of Malone we have in all probability lost the colour of Shakespeare's hair and eyes, which perhaps would do the world very little good to know, but would have been a little satis- faction to poor physiognomists like myself. We went also into the room where they say he was born. Every part of it is scribbled over with names. I was seized with a sort of enthusiasm, and wrote mine, tho' I was a little ashamed of it afterwards : yet the feeling was genuine at the time, and I did homage with the rest. I forgot Kenilworth. We tumbled about the ruins for three hours, but I was rather disappointed. I had expected to find them larger and more august. (My father came from Coventry to London and wrote "Cjodiva." He encloses "a virgin-ballad never yet written down," " Sweet Emma Morland " — " simple enough at any rate," he writes of it.)
After this date all correspondence between Alfred Tennyson and Emily Sellwood was forbidden; since there seemed to be no prospect of their ever being married, owing to that unfortunately
" Eternal want of pence Which vexes public men."
1S40] LETTER TO TENNANT. 1 77
Letters to and from friends^ 1840- 184 2.
This letter to Tennant, without date or address, I have found among the letters received from his friends at this period:
To Reverend R. J. Tennant'^.
My dear Robert,
It is about three centuries since I heard from you. I suppose you did not calculate on my sending you any answer, had you written. I think it just possible that I might: however my regard for you has thriven as lustily as ever in the silence, and I have had, now and then, certain memorials of you from different quarters: not indeed altogether grateful, for I am told that your wife has been ill almost the whole time you have been in Italy, also that you had lost great part of your library by shipwreck, also that you hated the land of the sun, where men, according to Alfieri, come up more vigorously than in other latitudes. Often have I intended to come over and pay you a visit, and as often my empty purse has gaped in my face and broken my dream of you and the Pitti palace together. Well, I suppose we shall meet somewhere or other on this side of the grave, and that our friendship at Cambridge has not been only to cease to be. How many puns have we made together ! how many walks have we taken arm in arm in the dark streets of the old University and on the Trumpington
^ Since Cambridge days Tennant had been in an unsettled frame of mind. He had been a frequenter of Coleridge^s famous gatherings at Highgate, had been shaken in his belief and had hesitated, like many others then, to take orders. Subsequently he was ordained and became curate to J. C. Hare, at Hurstmonceux (a post afterwards filled by John Sterling), then he lived for several years as English chaplain at Florence, where he died.
T. I. 12
1 78 MABLETHORPE. [l841
road ! and how you used to scepticize till we both ran away!
My people are located at a place which is my abomination, viz. Tunbridge Wells in this county; they moved thither from Essex by the advice of a London physician, who said it was the only place in England for the Tennyson constitution: the sequel is that they are half killed by the tenuity of the atmosphere and the presence of steel more or less in earth, air and water. I have sometimes tried to 'persuade them to live abroad but without effect, and I dare say you in your exile agree with them that there is no place like an English home.
I came over to this place about a fortnight back.
A. T.
To Edward Fitzgerald.
Mablethorpe, Alford, 1 841.
Dear old Fitz,
Not on the Western, on the Eastern coast. Mablethorpe near Alford in the fat shire of Lincoln is the place where I am. I walk about the coast, and have it all to myself, sand and sea. You bore me about my book; so does a letter just received from America, threatening, tho' in the civilest terms, that, if I will not publish in England, they will do it for me in that land of freemen. I may curse, knowing what they will bring forth. But I don't care. I am in a great haste writing for the muffin-man, my only communication with the world, who comes once a week bringing the produce of his art, also what letters may be stagnating at the Alford post, waits five minutes and then returns.
Always yours, A. T.
184l] BOLTON ABBEY AND WHARFEDALE. 1 79
To Edmund Lushington.
Otley, September igih, 1841.
My dear Edmund,
This is to let you know that I am at present in the classic neighbourhood of Bolton Abbey whither I was led the other day by some half-remembrance of a note to one of Wordsworth's poems, which told with me (to speak the truth) more than the poem itself : said Wordsworth having stated, (as far as I recollect) that everything which the eyes of man could desire in a land- skip was to be found at and about the Abbey aforesaid. I, coming with an imagination inflamed, and working upon this passage, was at first disappointed, but yesterday I took a walk of some seven or eight or, by our Lady* nine miles, to left and right of the Wharfe, and you may conjecture that no ordinary charms of nature could get nine miles walk out of legs {a^ present) more familiar with armchair and settle than rock and greensward, so that I suppose there is something in what Wordsworth asserts, and that something will probably keep me here some time, and whether I shall see you or no before you return to Glasgow is thereby rendered uncertain. I suppose there is no chance of your coming here, is there ? that would be a Godsend I have no right to expect, but Harry at High Beech was a Godsend I did not expect. Poor fellow, he was very nervous, very uncomfortable too about his Italian journey, but in that respect I found it hard to sympathize with him.
Ever yours, A. Tennyson.
1 8o '' CENONE " IN GREEK HEXAMETERS. [l842
To Edmund Lushington,
BoxLEY, Early in 1843.
Dear Edmund,
I was very glad to hear of the reconvalescence of your " G^schwister " for I had some fancy (as I told you) that all was not right. Your lines ^ I liked. Some doubt I had about " iroXviriSaicc " but Venables set me right: not that I believed ^^w could be out of your Greek, but the " irokvTT&aKo^ ^iSiys " ran in my head. " Nacr/i^ iv aii<l>tpvT<p " is a wrong translation, the rest good. I have no news. I have not yet taken my book to Moxon. Spedding's going to America has a little disheartened me, for some fop will get the start of him in the £d. Review where he promised to put an article and I have had abuse enough. Moreover Spedding was just the man to do it, both as knowing me, and writing from clear conviction. However I intend to get it out shortly, but I cannot say I have been what you professors call "working" at it, that indeed is not my way. I take my pipe and the muse descends in a fume, not like your modem ladies who shriek at a pipe as if they saw a " splacknuck " : do you know what a splacknuck is * ? I have been once into your grounds, the house looked very unhappy. Charles and I went together: he admired the place much, tho' everything was deep in snow.
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
1 A translation of << CEnone " in Greek hexameters.
*''His Majesty, a Prince of much Gravity, and austere Countenance, not well observing my shape at first view, asked the Queen after a cold manner, how long it was since she grew fond of a Splacknuck ? for such it seems he took me to be, as I lay upon my breast on her Majesty^s Right hand.*^ Swift^s Voyagt to Brob(^ngnag.
184l] STERLING AND CARLYLE. l8l
From John Sterling.
South Place, Knightsbridge, Oct. 26ik.
My dear Tennyson,
Your note afflicted us, and others too. I have long wished to be allowed to see something of you, and now that you would be kind enough to permit it we are both invalids, and I in London only for two or three days. For my part however I will not give the thing up and shall either call on you or write to you again in a day or two. Carlyle was her6 yesterday evening, growled at having missed you, and said more in your praise than in any one's except Cromwell and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie knife and since run away to Texas.
I learn from Americans who were also here that a certain Wheeler (known to you I think by name) is dead : whether he has carried your dollars with him and paid them by mistake to Beelzebub or Orpheus I know not. For the moment farewell.
Believe me truly yours, John Sterlijxg \
^ Before his death at Ventnor in September, 1844, Sterling reviewed the 1842 volume favourably in the Quarterly^ classing my £ather*8 poems ''among the richest of our recent literature.^'
CHAPTER VIII.
LONDON LIFE AND THE 1842 VOLUMES.
It is long since we have had so good a lyrist ; it will be long before we have his superior. ^ Godiva ^ is a noble poem that will tell the legend a thousand years... "Locksley Hall" and "The Two Voices" are meditative poems, which were slowly written to be slowly read. " The Talking Oak," though a little hurt by its wit and ingenuity, is beautiful, and the most poetic of the volume. " Ulysses " belongs to a high class of poetry, destined to be the highest, and to be more cultivated in the next generation. "CEnone" was a sketch of the same kind.
Emerson.
Tunbridge Wells was not liked by my grandmother, so she and the family migrated to Boxley not far from Maidstone in order to be near the Lushingtons at Park House; Edmund Lushington, the accomplished Greek and German scholar and Egyptologist, having married Miss Cecilia Tennyson. The park round the house is described in the prologue to "The Princess." My father had a par- ticularly high regard not only for Edmund and Franklin Lushington but also for their brother Harry, and would say, " Others may find faults in a poem, but Harry finds the fault and tells you how to mend it." He is one of the three ^ friends mentioned in the poem " In the Garden at Swainston." His memory was surprising and his criticism always of the finest. " His taste was perhaps rendered more exquisite by his personal anxiety for the perfection and success of works which could scarce have interested him more if they had been his own composition." At
^Arthur Hallam, Henry Lushington, Sir John Simeon.
183
1842] SOJOURNINGS IN LONDON. 1 83
Park House my father met many friends, old and new ; Monckton Milnes, Venables, Chapman, Savile Morton, Lear, and William Thomson (now Lord Kelvin). With one of these friends, or more generally by himself, he would take long walks either on the Pilgrim's Road, or to some one of the picturesque villages in the neighbour- hood.
From time to time he stayed in town and mingled with all sorts and conditions of men. He always de- lighted in the " central roar " of London. Whenever he and I went to London, one of the first things we did was to walk to the Strand and Fleet Street. " Instead of the stuccoed houses in the West End, this is the place where I should like to live," he would say. He was also fond of looking at London from the bridges over the Thames, and of going into St Paul's, and into the Abbey. One day in 1842 Fitzgerald records a visit to St Paul's with him when he said, " Merely as an inclosed space in a huge city this is very fine," and when they got out into the open, in the midst of the " central roar," " This is the mind ; that is a mood of it"
He writes, " My lodgings are the last house, Norfolk Street, Strand, at the bottom of the street on the left ; the name is Edwards which you will see projecting from the door on a brass plate." Generally he would stay at the Temple or in Lincoln's Inn Fields; dining with his friends at The Cock, and other taverns \
^ Savile Morton, for some years the brilliant Paris correspondent of the Daily NewSy wrote of one of these dinners : " Thackeray gave the dinner — Tennyson, Forster (the literary critic of the Examiner) y Emerson Tennant, M.P., Crowe an author, and Maclise were the party. Lever, the ballad and Irish story man, came at the beginning, and told Alfred he was greatly delighted to meet a brother-poet, the cool impudence of which amused the party greatly, at Lever^s expense.... The largeness of Alfred^s proportions, both physical and poetical, were universally the theme of admiration. Maclise admired him excessively, and fell quite in love with him/* {From an unpublished letter {undated) to Mary Brothertony author of ^^ Rosemary for Remembrance'^ and ^Old Acquaintance y)
184 LONDON LIFE AND THE 1 842 VOLUMES. [l842
A perfect dinner was a beef-steak, a potato, a cut of cheese, a pint of port, and afterwards a pipe (never a cigar). When joked with by his friends about his liking for cold salt beef and new potatoes, he would answer humorously, "All fine-natured men know what is good to eat." Very genial evenings they were, with plenty of anecdote and wit and "thrust and parry of bright monostich." At good sayings my father would sit laugh- ing away, " laughter often interrupted by fits of sadness." He would take oflf the voices and expressions of well- known public characters, protesting that " The oddities and angularities of great men should never be hawked about," or he would dramatically give parts of Shakespeare or of Moli&re, or "enact with grim humour Milton's *So started up in his foul shape the fiend,' from the crouching of the toad to the explosion ^
He used also to do the sun coming out from a cloud, and retiring into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting of the eyes, and with a great fluffing up of his hair into full wig and elevation of cravat and collar; George IV. in as comical and wonderful a way. * The plump head- waiter of The Cock,' by Temple Bar, famous for chop and porter, was rather offended when told of the poem (* Will Waterproof '). * Had Mr Tenny- son dined oftener there, he would not have minded it so much,* he said. I think A. T.'s chief dinner resort in these ante-laureate days was Bertolini's at the Newton's Head, close to Leicester Square. We sometimes called it Dirtolini's, but not seriously ; for the place was clean as well as very cheap and the cookery good for the price. Bertolini himself, who came to take the money at the end of the feast, was a grave and polite man. He retired with a fortune I think ^.'*
My father was a member of the Sterling Club, a literary Society of those days named in Sterling's honour, where he met many of his old fellow "Apostles." He
1 << Depend upon iV* my father said, '< Milton shot up into some grim Archangel, Fitz." (1843.)
* MS Note, Edward Fitzgerald.
1842] VIEWS ON REFORM. 185
also often saw Carlyle, Rogers, " Barry Cornwall," Thackeray, Dickens, Forster, Savage Landor, Maclise, Leigh Hunt, and Tom Campbell. I have heard that he always showed an eager interest in the events and in the great scientific discoveries and economic inven- tions and improvements of the time \ His talk largely touched upon politics ^ philosophy and theology, and the new speculations rife on every side. Upon the projects of reform, or the great movements of philanthropy he reflected much.
Yearning for the large excitement that the coming
years would yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his
father's field.
The Chartist and Socialist agitations were then alarming the country. My father thought they should be met not by universal imprisonment and repression, but by a widespread National education, by more of a patriotic and less of a party spirit in the Press, by partial adoption of Free Trade principles, and by an increased energy and sympathy among those who belonged to the dififerent forms of Christianity. He was sometimes described as advancing opposite opinions at dififerent times. This was because from his firm sense of justice he had a dramatic way of representing an opinion adverse to his own in a favourable light, in order that he might give it the most generous interpretation possible.
^ Alluding to one such improvement he said : ** Before the Penny Post a wretched review from the Continent followed me all over England, and I had to pay one pound eight shillings for it/*
* I have heard him speak of his feelings at that time about the Afghan campaign: he thought that we ought to stand no trifling in Afghanistan; and that the English Cabinet was neglectful of the advice of Polonius: ''Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, bearH that the opposer may beware of thee/^ Speaking of Canadian affairs, he gloried in the work done by Lord Durham and in the form of Colonial Government initiated by him in Canada.
V
1 86 LONDON LIFE AND THE 1 842 VOLUMES. [l842
These indeed were years rich in social and political movement: it may be enough to name Bright and Cobden, Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens, each with his exposure of abuses, or efforts for amendment. The atmosphere of the time inspired such lines as the following :
Ah, tho' the times when some new thought can bud Are but as poets' seasons when they flower. Yet seas that daily gain upon the shore Have ebb and flow conditioning their march. And slow and sure comes up the golden year, When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps, But smit with freer light shall slowly melt In many streams to fatten lower lands. And light shall spread, and man be liker man Thro' all the season of the golden year.
Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press; Fly happy with the mission of the Cross; Knit land to land, and blowing havenward With silks, and fruits, and spices, clear of toll, Enrich the markets of the golden year\
Theology, always a deep interest to him, shared in this advance. The Oxford movement had been begun by a band of saintly and devoted churchmen, and the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford with the heads of houses had already censured the author of Tract No. XC^. Mean- while Maurice, Kingsley and the Cambridge men were striving to make thought more tolerant, and to impress all men with a sense of brotherhood. Both efforts in a few years effected a mighty change in
1 ''The Golden Year" was first published in 1846 in the Poems (4th ed.)- ' Published February 1841.
1842] WORD-PORTRAIT BY CARLYLE. 1 87
the spirit of the National Church by broadening its borders and deepening its spirituality.
The biographies of friends and acquaintances, recently published, are full of allusions to my father at this period. Perhaps the most life-like portrait^ is that drawn by Carlyle for Emerson in America.
Alfred is one of the few British and foreign figures (a not increasing number I think) who are and remain beautiful to me, a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, " Brother ! " However, I doubt he will not come [to see me] ; he often skips me, in these brief visits to town ; skips everybody, indeed ; being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom, carry- ing a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing
into Cosmos He had his breeding at Cambridge, as if for
the Law or Church; being master of a small annuity on his father's decease, he preferred clubbing with his mother and some sisters, to live unpromoted and write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here, now there; the family always within reach of London, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade's rooms. I think he must be under forty, not much under it One of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusky dark hair; bright, laughing, hazel eyes ; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian looking, clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy, smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous; I do not meet in these late
^ On Sept. 5th, 1840, Carlyle had sketched another portrait of my fether for his brother John : '< Some weeks ago, one night, the poet Tennyson and Matthew Allen were discovered here sitting smoking in the garden. Tenny- son had been here before, but was still new to Jane, — who was alone for the first hour or two of it. A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy; who swims, outwardly and inwardly, with great composure in an articulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco-smoke; great now and then when he does emerge; a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man. Allen looked con- siderably older ; speculative, hopeful, earnest-frothy as from the beginning.^ (See for Allen, p. 220.)
1 88 LONDON UFE AND THE 1 842 VOLUMES. [l842
decades such company over a pipe I we shall see what he will grow to.
Mrs. Carlyle also gives a characteristic portrait :
Three of the autographs which I send you to-day are first- rate. A Yankee would almost give a dollar apiece for them. Entire characteristic letters from Pickwick, Lytton Bulwer and Alfred Tennyson; the last the greatest genius of the three, though the vulgar public have not as yet recognized him as such. Get his poems if you can, and read the " Ulysses," " Dora," the " Vision of Sin," and you will find that we do not overrate him. Besides, he is a very handsome man, and a noble-hearted one, with something of the gypsy in his appearance, which for me is perfectly charming. Babbie never saw him, unf ortimately, or perhaps I should say fortunately, for she must have fallen in love with him on the spot, unless she be made absolutely of ice; and then men of genius have never anything to keep wives upon.
Carlyle did not, I believe, become intimate with my father until after 1842, " being naturally prejudiced against one whom everyone was praising, and praising for a sort of poetry which he despised. But directly he saw and heard the Man, he knew there was a man to deal with and took pains to cultivate him ; assiduous in exhorting him to leave Verse and Rhyme, and to apply his genius to Prose \" Indeed he told him then that he was " a life-guardsman spoilt by making poetry."
When the 1842 volumes were published the literary world in London accepted them at once, and Milnes* and Sterling led the chorus of favourable reviews.
My father's comprehension of human life had grown : and the new poems dealt with an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, chivalry, duty, reverence, self-control, human passion, human love, the love of country, science,
^ MS Note, Edward Fitzgerald.
* Westminster Review^ October, 1842.
1842] THE ENGLISH IDYLS. 1 89
philosophy, simple faith and the many complex moods of the religious nature ; whilst they were free from the brooding self-absorption into which modern poetry is liable to lapse, and from what Arthur Hallam called " the habit of seeking relief in idiosyncrasies."
It was the heart of England even more than her imagination that he made his own. It was the Humanities and the truths underlying them that he sang, and he so sang them that any deep-hearted reader was made to feel through his far-reaching thought that those Humanities are spiritual things, and that to touch them is to touch the garment of the Divine. Those who confer so deep a benefit cannot but be remembered. The Heroic is not greatly appreciated in these days ; but on this occasion the challenge met with a response \
With a selection from the early poems, some of them almost rewritten, appeared a number of English Idyls and Eclogues, pictures of English home and country life, quite original in their form. Upon the sacredness of home life he would maintain that the stability and greatness of a nation largely depend; and one of the secrets of his power over mankind was his true joy in the family duties and aflfections. Among these new poems were " The Gardener's Daughter," " Dora," "Audley Court," "Walking to the Mail," "The Talking Oak," " Locksley Hall," " Godiva," " Edward Gray," " Lady Clare," " The Lord of Burleigh," " Will Waterproof," and the conclusion of " The May Queen." Then there were the more general poems, " Morte d'Arthur," "St Simeon Stylites," "Love and Duty," " Ulysses," " The Two Voices," " The Day-Dream*, " "Amphion," "St Agnes' Eve," "Sir Galahad," "Sir
* Aubrey de Vere (in letter to me).
' The Prologue and Epilogue were added after 1835, when we first heard it in Cumberland ; I suppose for the same reason that caused the Prologue of the " Morte d'Arthur,^^ giving a reason for telling an old-world tale. MS Note, E. F. G.
In 1843 he had eight of the blank verse poems printed for his private use.
IQO LONDON LIFE AND THE 1 842 VOLUMES. [l842
Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," " A Farewell," " The Beggar Maid," " The Vision of Sin," " Move east- ward, happy Earth," " Break, Break " (made in a Lincoln- s^iire lane at 5 o'clock in the morning between blossom- g hedges), " The Poet's Song," and his three political poems.
On the other side of the Atlantic these volumes were also welcomed ; Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe were notably enthusiastic.
The popular German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath writes to Mary Howitt from Frankfort, Oct. 1842 : " Ten- nyson is indeed a true poet, though perhaps sometimes a little too transcendental. * Mariana in the Moated Grange,' and some other of his poems are superb ; and breathe such a sweet and dreamy melancholy that I cannot cease to read and admire them\"
The most remarkable review of these volumes was by Spedding in the Edinburgh for April 1843 (reprinted in Reviews and Discussions)^ from which I subjoin ex- tracts, as these give accurately the growth of his friend's mind.
The decade during which Mr Tennyson has remained silent has wrought a great improvement. The handling in his later pieces is much lighter and freer ; the interest deeper and purer ; there is more humanity with less image and drapery ; a closer adherence to truth ; a greater reliance for effect upon the sim- plicity of Nature. Moral and spiritual traits of character are more dwelt upon, in place of external scenery and circumstance. He addresses himself more to the heart and less to the ear and eye. This change which is felt in its results throughout the second volume, may in the latter half of the first be traced in
because he always liked to see his poems in print some months and some- times some years before publication, ^ for," as he said, '< poetry looks better, more convincing, in print." This little volume was entiUed Morti d^ Arthur ; Doray and other Idyis,
' From private letter lent by Miss Howitt.
1842] "THE miller's DAUGHTER." I9I
its process. The poems originally published in 1832 are many of them largely altered; generally with great judgment, and always with a view to strip off redundancies, to make the ex- pression simpler and clearer, to substitute thought for imagery and substance for shadow. " The Lady of Shalott," for instance, is stripped of all her finery ; her pearl garland, her velvet bed, her royal apparel and her "blinding diamond bright," are all gone; and certainly in the simple white robe which she now wears, her beauty shows to much greater advantage.
"The Miller's Daughter," again, is much enriched by the introduction of the mother of the lover; and the following beautiful stanzas (which many people, however, will be ill satisfied to miss) are displaced to make room for beauty of a much higher order :
Remember you the clear moonlight
That whiten'd all the eastern ridge, When o'er the water dancing white
I stepp'd upon the old mill bridge? I heard you whisper from above,
A lute-toned whisper, " I am here ! " I murmur'd "Speak again, my love.
The stream is loud : I cannot hear I "
I heard, as I have seem'd to hear.
When all the under-air was still. The low voice of the glad New Year
Call to the freshly-flower'd hill. I heard, as I have often heard,
The nightingale in leafy woods Call to its mate when nothing stirr'd
To left or right but falling floods.
These, we observe, are away ; and the following graceful and tender picture, full of the spirit of English rural life, appears in their place. (The late squire's son, we should premise, is bent on marrying the daughter of the wealthy miller :)
And slowly was my mother brought To yield consent to my desire:
192 LONDON UFE AND THE 1 842 VOLUMES. [l842
And rose, and, with a silent grace Approaching, press'd you heart to heart
Vol. L p. 109.
Mr Spedding goes on to say that in the song of "The Lotos-Eaters," which " hardly admitted of improve- ment," my father had added "some touches of deeper significance, indicating the first effects of the physical disease upon the moral and intellectual nature:
Dear is the memory of our wedded lives.
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot stars."
Vol. L p. 182.
Then at the end of the poem there is found an alteration of a like kind : where for the flow of triumphant enjoyment, in the contemplation of merely sensual ease and luxurious repose, with which it originally closed, a higher strain is substituted, which is meant apparently to show the effect of lotos-eating upon the religious feelings. The gods of the Lotos-eaters, it is worth knowing, are altogether Lucretian.
" The May Queen ^ " too was made " more deeply and tragically interesting " by the third and concluding part. But the four poems, in which " the work is at the highest level," and from which we may gather some hints concerning " his moral theory of life and its issues and of that which constitutes a sound condition of the soul," are " The Palace of Art," the dramatic monologue of " St Simeon Stylites," " The Two Voices," and " The Vision of Sin."
** The Palace of Art " represents allegorically the condition of a mind which, in the love of beauty, and the triumphant consciousness of knowledge, and intellectual supremacy, in the intense enjoyment of its own power and glory, has lost sight
^ '^The May Queen" is all Lincolnshire inland, as ^'Locksley Hall" its sea-board. MS Note, £. F. G.
1842] "THE TWO VOICES." 1 93
of its relation to man and God. ♦ ♦ ♦ As "The Palace of Art" represents the pride of voluptuous enjoyment in its noblest form, the "St Simeon Stylites" represents the pride of asceticism in its basest \
Of " The Two Voices * " Spedding says :
In " The Two Voices " we have a history of the agitations, the suggestions and counter-suggestions of a mind sunk in hopeless despondency, and meditating self-destruction ; together with the manner of its recovery to a more healthy condition. . . . Others would have been content to give the bad voice the worst of the argument; but, unhappily, all moral reasoning must ultimately rest on the internal evidence of the moral sense; and where this is disordered, the most unquestionable logic can conclude nothing, because it is the first principles which are at issue ; the major is not admitted. Mr Tennyson's
treatment of the case is more scientific " The Vision of
Sin" touches upon a more awful subject than any of these; the end, here and hereafter, of the merely sensual man. .
In conclusion Spedding adds, that these poems show that the author's art is no trick of these versifying times, bom of a superficial sensibility to beauty and a turn for setting to music the current doctrines and fashionable feelings of the day; but a genuine growth of nature, having its root deep in the pensive heart, a heart accus- tomed to meditate earnestly and feel truly upon the prime duties and interests of man.
Some notes on the second volume have been left me by my father, the first of which is on the " Morte d'Arthur." This particular note I wrote down from what
^ This is one of the poems A. T. would read with grotesque grimness, especially such passages as ^ coughs, aches, stitches,*^ etc., laughing aloud at times. MS Note, £. F. G.
*My father told me, "When I wrote *The Two Voices' I was so utterly miserable, a burden to m3rself and to my family, that I said, ' Is life worth an3rthing?' and now that I am old, I fear that I shall only live a year or two, for I have work still to do.'' The last part, £. F. G. writes, was probably made in the fields about Dulwich.
T. I. 13
194 LONDON UFE AND THE 1 842 VOLUMES. [l842
he said ; but he gave it his approval, as expressing his own view correctly.
" How much of history we have in the story of Arthur is doubtful. Let not my readers press too hardly on details whether for history or for allegory. Some think that King Arthur may be taken to typify conscience. He is anyhow meant to be a man who spent himself in the cause of honour, duty and self-sacrifice, who felt and aspired with his nobler knights, though with a stronger and a clearer conscience than any of them, ' reverencing his conscience as his king.' * There was no such perfect man since Adam ' as an old writer says. * Major prae- t^ritis majorque f uturis Regibus.' "
Edward Fitzgerald writes :
The " Morte d' Arthur " when read to us from manuscript in 1835 had no introduction or epilogue; which was added to anticipate or excuse the " faint Homeric echoes," etc. (as in the " Day-Dream "), to give a reason for telling an old-world tale.
Again :
Mouthing out his hollow oes and aes, deep-chested music, this is something as A. T. reads, with a broad north country vowel, except the u in such words as " mute,'* " brute," which he pronounces like the thin French "u." His voice, very deep and deep-chested, but rather murmuring than mouthing, like the sound of a far sea or of a pine-wood, I remember greatly struck Carlyle when he first came to know him. There was no declamatory showing off in A. T.'s recitation of his verse ; sometimes broken with a laugh, or a burlesque twist of voice, when something struck him as quaint or grim. Some- times Spedding would read the poems to us ; A. T. once told him he seemed to read too much as if bees were about his mouth, all in good humour as in sincerity. Of the Chivalry Romances he said to me, "I could not read 'Palmerin of England' nor 'Amadis,' nor any other of those Romances through. The 'Morte d' Arthur' is much the best: there are very fine things in it, but all strung together without Art^."
» MS Note.
1842] "LOCKSLEY HALL.*' 1 95
In " Locksley Hall " my father annotates the line ** Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change." " When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830), I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line." — Further: "* Locksley Hall' is an imaginary place (tho' the coast is Lincolnshire) and the hero is imaginary. The whole poem represents young life, its good side, its deficiencies, and its yearnings. Mr Hallam said to me that the English people liked verse in Trochaics, so I wrote the poem in this metre."
In the first unpublished edition of " Locksley Hall," after " knots of Paradise'^ came the following couplet, which was omitted lest the description should be too long:
All about a summer ocean, leagues on leagues of
golden calm. And within melodious waters rolling round the knolls
of palm.
I remember my father saying that Sir William Jones' prose translation of the Moallakdi, the seven Arabic poems (which are a selection from the work of pre-Mahommedan poets) hanging up in the temple of Mecca, gave him the idea of the poem.
When these volumes were published my father was often in the habit of breakfasting with Rogers, for whom he had a real affection, but who "rather bored him with attentions, very generous and amiable from the old poet." Rogers would praise "Locksley Hall," and would say "Shakespeare could not have done it better." " I should have thought," observed my father, "that such a poem as ' Dora' was more in Rogers' line:
13—3
198 LONDON LIFE AND THE 1 842 VOLUMES. [l842
I remember too my father's telling me that Fitz- gerald had said that the autumn landscape, which in the first edition was described in the lines beginning " Her beauty grew," was taken from a background of a Titian (Lord EUesmere's Ages of Man) ; and that perhaps in consequence they had been omitted. They ran thus :
Her beauty grew : iill drawn in narrowing arcs The southing Autumn touched with sallower gleams The granges on the fallows. At that time. Tired of the noisy town I wander'd there; The bell toU'd four; and by the time I reach'd The Wicket-gate, I found her by herself.
The correction of the proofs of this poem and of this volume took place in Spedding's chambers at 60 Lincoln's Inn Fields, m the forepart of 1842. The poems to be printed were nearly all, I think all, in a foolscap folio parchment-bound blank book such as accounts are kept in (only not ruled), and which I used to call "The Butcher's Book." The poems were written in A. T.'s very fine hand (he once said, not thinking of himself, that great men generally wrote " terse " hands) toward one side of the large page ; the unoccupied edges and comers being often stript down for pipe-lights, taking care to save the MS, as A. T. once seriously observed. The pages of MS from the Butcher's Book were one by one torn out for the printer, and, when returned with the proofs, were put in the fire. I reserved two or three of the leaves ; and gave them to the Library of Trinity College (Cambridge ^\
I insert here an unpublished poem which was origi- nally intended as a prologue to " The Gardener's Daugh- ter " and was called " The Ante-Chamber." My father wished it never to be printed in front of "The Gardener's Daughter " because this is already full enough. It is however too good to be lost. The portrait in "The
1 E. F. G., MS notes on A. T.
18i2] "THE ANTE-CHAMBER." I99
Ante-Chamber " might be himself at the period, — so his friends say, — but that was by no means his intention^
The Ante-Chamber* {Unpublished.)
That is his portrait painted by himself. Look on those manly curls so glossy dark, Those thoughtful furrows in the swarthy cheek; Admire that stalwart shape, those ample brows, And that large table of the breast dispread. Between low shoulders ; how demure a smile. How full of wisest humour and of love. With some half-consciousness of inward power. Sleeps round those quiet lips; not quite a smile; And look you what an arch the brain has built Above the ear! and what a settled mind, Mature, harbour'd from change, contemplative, Tempers the peaceful light of hazel eyes, Observing all things. This is he I loved. This is the man of whom you heard me speak.
My fancy was the more luxurious. But his was minted in a deeper mould. And took in more of Nature than mine own: Nor proved I such delight as he, to mark The humours of the polling and the wake. The hubbub of the market and the booths: How this one smiled, that other waved his arms, These careful and those candid brows, how each- Down to his slightest turns and attitudes — Was something that another could not be, How every brake and flower spread and rose, A various world! which he compelled once more Thro' his own nature, with well mingled hues,
^ Samuel Laurence painted the earliest portrait of my father about 1838.
* Copyright, 1897, by The Macmillan Company.
200 LONDON LIFE AND THE 1842 VOLUMES. [1842
Into another shape, born of the first, As beautiful, but yet another world.
All this so stirr'd him in his hour of joy, Mix'd with the phantom of his coming fame, That once he spake : " I lift the eyes of thought, I look thro' all my glimmering life, I see At the end, as 'twere athwart a colour'd cloud. O'er the bow'd shoulder of a bland old Age, The face of placid Death." Long, Eustace, long May my strong wish, transgressing the low bound Of mortal hope, act on Eternity To keep thee here amongst us! Yet he lives; His and my friendship have not suflfer'd loss. His fame is equal to his years: his praise Is neither overdealt, nor idly won.
Step thro' these doors, and I will show to you Another countenance, one yet more dear. More dear, for what is lost is made more dear; "More dear" I will not say, but rather bless The All-perfect Framer, Him, who made the heart, Forethinking its twinfold necessity. Thro' one whole life an overflowing urn, Capacious both of Friendship and of Love.
CHAPTER IX.
REMINISCENCES OF TENNYSON (about 1842).
[At this time there seems to have been an almost total cessation of corre- spondence between my hthtr and his intimate friends; and I accord- ingly asked Edmund Lushington, the present Dean of Westminster, and Aubrey de Vere to give me some reminiscences of those days.]
Edmund Lushington writes :
During my first two years at Cambridge I had no acquaintance with A. T. ; the first occasion I can remember of knowing him by sight was when Arthur Hallam read in the College Chapel his essay which gained the first declamation prize. The place where the reader stood was slightly raised above the able of the chapel; A. T. sat on the bench just below, listening intently to the spoken words.
At this time, and indeed for several years later, copies of nu- merous poems of his were widely circulated about Cambridge in MS, and I remember one debate in a Society called the " Fifty," on the rank to which his poetry was entitled, in the course of which numerous passages were quoted from poems as yet not publicly known — "The Gardener's Daughter" in particular.
I believe the first time he visited me in my own house was in the summer of 1840 when he came to stay a few days. He was then habitually residing with his mother and sisters at Tunbridge Wells, where, beautiful as the neighbourhood was, the site was found not healthy for all of the family, and they were wishing to meet with some other place to settle in. A day or two later I went over with him to pay a short visit to his mother's house at Tunbridge Wells, where among other nota- bilities we saw an old lady famous for cherishing memories of
201
202 REMINISCENCES OF TENNYSON IN EARLY DAYS. [l842
the great Dr Samuel Johnson, whose likeness graced an ex- pansive medallion which she wore about her neck, Miss L.^ Not long after this visit he came over with his mother and two younger sisters to stay some days at Park House, which they partly spent in looking round the neighbouring country at any such houses as might appear to be suitable for a settled residence in preference to Tunbridge Wells.
They eventually settled before long upon engaging a house be- longing to Colonel Best in Boxley Parish, to which they removed before the winter of 1841-42. The house was nearly two miles by the road, rather less by the fields, from our residence at Park House, which is nearer Maidstone. Early in October we drove up in an open phaeton to London by the old coach-road which knew no railways in that time. Whether A. T. went up with us I am not sure : at any rate the next day he was in London and came to take leave of us at the station where we left by train for the north. I remember how some one out of a crowd of lookers on, just before the train was starting, after a long gaze at his dark features uttered an emphatic " foreign."
At Xmas 1841 I went for a few days' holiday from Glasgow to Kent and spent the time mostly at Boxley, where A. T. was now settled with his mother and sisters. We had sometimes dance and song in the evening, where, tho' no one spoke of it, assuredly many a heart was filled " with an awful sense of one mute Shadow watching all," as his own undying words record of an earlier occasion. In the meantime the number of the memorial poems had rapidly increased since I had seen the poet, his book containing many that were new to me. Some I heard him repeat before I had seen them in writing, others I learnt to know first from the book itself which he kindly allowed me to look through without stint I remember one particular night when we were sitting up together late in his bedroom. He began to recite the poem that stands sixth in " In Memoriam," " One writes, that ' Other friends remain,' " and I do not know that the deep melodious thunder of his voice with all its overwhelming pathos, often and often as I have heard it, ever imprest me more profoundly. On one other occasion he
^ She observed that Dr Johnson ** often stirred his lemonade with his finger and that often dirty." My father was very angry with her for relating such a story about a great man, and said, '' The dirt is in her own heart."
1842] MARRIAGE OF CECILIA TENNYSON. 203
came and showed me a poem he had just composed, saying he liked it better than most he had done lately, this was No. li., " Do we indeed desire the dead.**
He was present on July 6th, 1842, at a festival of the Maid- stone Mechanics' Institute held in our Park, of which he has introduced a lively description in the beginning of "The Princess."
In the course of that summer appeared the collection of his poems published in two vols.; the first contains, with some exceptions, the poems published under the title Poems^ chiefly Lyrical ^ in 1830, and as a second division, with various changes, those which first appeared in 1832. The second volume had all new poems, already known to many in private circulation, but not as yet openly given to the world.
He went with me once or twice to London to make arrange- ments such as are required by the law with reference to the marriage of his youngest sister Cecilia. The marriage ceremony was performed by his elder brother, the Rev. Charles Tennyson Turner, who had come to spend some time with his mother and with whom I then first became acquainted.
In the hottest part of the summer (1845) A. T. had gone down to Eastbourne, and was lodging in one of two or three cottages prettily grouped together, bearing the well-deserved name of Mount Pleasant. A little garden lay in front of the cottages, beyond that a cornfield extended some way till it was stopt by a path on the edge of the cliflF, which overlooked the sea, and continued its course on to Holywell. Mount Pleasant and all in front of it has now vanished through the encroachment of the sea. Its last vestige I saw many years since as a brick fragment in the yard of a grand new hotel built just above the parade to which the present sea-line reaches. I went down there to see him and remained a few days. He had then completed many of the cantos in " In Memoriam " and was engaged on "The Princess," of which I had heard nothing before. He read or showed me the first part, beyond which it had then hardly advanced. He said to me, " I have brought in your marriage at the end of ' In Memoriam,' " and then showed me those poems of " In Memoriam " which were finished and which were a per- fectly novel surprise to me.
204 REMINISCENCES OF TENNYSON IN EARLY DAYS. [l842
The Dean of Westminster writes :
In 1 84 1 and 1842 I paid two visits in the month of August to Park House near Maidstone, the property of your father's brother-in-law Edmund Lushington, who in those days made it his southern residence during the many months of the long vacation that set him free from his laborious work in Scotland. I found there not only a bright, charming and happy group of his brothers and sisters, four sisters and two brothers, the Henry Lushington who died at Malta in the year 1855, and my own friend and contemporary Franklin, but one or two Visitors, Mr George Venables, and Mr Chapman, a Fellow I think then of Jesus College, Cambridge. I shall never forget the impression made on me by coming in contact with men so striking at once in character and ability, and yet a circle so wholly, so widely, dififerent from that which had gathered round Arnold at Rugby, or with which I was familiar, so far as was possible for one so young, at my own University. The questions that stirred so deeply our seniors and ourselves at Oxford, the position of J. H. Newman and his friends, the course of the " Oxford movement," the whole Tractarian Controversy, were scarcely mentioned, or, if mentioned, were spoken of as matters of secondary or remote interest: while on the other hand the Lushington brothers, especially the Professor, " uncle Edmund" as I have always heard you term him, seemed as much at home in the language of the Greek dramatists as if it was their native tongue, while of Henry I remember his friend Chapman saying that it was difficult to quote or read a line of Shake- speare, to which he could not at once give the reference and the context Of Mr Venables and the position which he had long held among his Cambridge friends and which he was already gaining in London literary society, I need not speak. How many of that group, whose wide and varied attainments, un- studied but suggestive conversation, so impressed the young Oxford undergraduate, fresh from so different an atmosphere, have passed beyond the veil!
It was in the midst of these, all his warm friends and asso- ciates, that I first saw your father. I feel sure that I saw him during my first visit ; on the second occasion he and his mother and sisters had been living for some months in Boxley Hall, the parish in which Park House is situated. The Professor was
1942] MEETINGS AT PARK HOUSE. 205
already engaged to your aunt Cecilia Tennyson, and the wedding followed soon after my return home. Your father was I need hardly say constantly at Park House, and there were few days on which I did not see him. The year was marked by the recent publication of the two-volume edition of his poems. The first volume, a copy of which during my visit was given me by Frank Lushmgton, is still a treasured possession. The second alas! is lost. I try to look back through the mist of years and see your father as I saw him then ; I remember watching him as he sat on a garden seat on the grass, in a brown suit, looking somewhat grave and silent, and wondering whether my friends at Oxford would feel as I did the poems which I had already read, " Mariana," " The Gardener's Daughter," " CEnone," " Locksley Hall," and " The Two Voices." Of his conversation I can only recall one or two f ragpnaents. We, the younger members of the party, as well as the older guests and your father, were in the garden employed, some of the party in gathering, some in eating wall-fruit, peaches and apricots. Some one made a remark about the fruit bemg liable to disagree with himself or others, to which another (it was Chapman) replied with a jocular remark about ''the disturbed districts," alluding of course to some disorders apprehended or existing in the centres of industry. I remember being startled by your father's voice and accent, " I can't joke about so grave a question," and thinking to myself that it was exactly what one so different as Dr Arnold, who had died some two months earlier, might have said under similar circumstances.
Again, I was greatly struck by his describing to us on one singularly still starlit evening, how he and his friends had once sat out far into the night having tea at a table on the lawn beneath the stars, and that the candles had burned with steady upright flame, disturbed from time to time by the inrush of a moth or cockchafer, as tho' in a closed room. I do not know whether he had already written, or was perhaps even then shaping, the lines in ''In Memoriam," which so many years afterwards brought back to me the incident.
As one looks back to the years previous to 1842 it is curious to notice the immense change caused by the publication of those two volumes. On my return to Oxford in October 1842 his name was on everyone's lips, his poems discussed, criticised, interpreted; portions of them repeatedly set for translation
i/
206 REMINISCENCES OF TENNYSON IN EARLY DAYS. [l842
into Latin or Greek verse at schools and colleges; read and re-read so habitually that there were many of us who could repeat page after page from memory. At one of the earliest meetings which I remember at a small debating Society, " The Decade," well known at Oxford in those days, I think it was in 1844, was a discussion as to the relative merits of Words- worth and Tennyson, in which I especially recall the speeches of J. C. Shairp, A. H. Clough, and I think I may add of the future Chief Justice John Coleridge.
It was a great change ; though no doubt a small, I should think a very small, circle of Oxford residents may have been more or less acquainted with his published poems at an earlier date. In a letter from Arthur Stanley, written from Hurst- monceux Rectory in the September of 1834, he says to his friend W. C. Lake (afterwards Dean of Durham), still at Rugby, that Julius Hare, with whom he was staying, " often reads to us in the evening things quite new to me, for instance (tell it not in Gath) A. Tennyson's Poems** and he goes on to name some which had greatly pleased him, and to advise his friend to get the volume and read it. The expression " tell it not," etc. is no doubt a reference to the acrid and contemptuous article in the Quarterly of 1833.
The readings at Hurstmonceux were not forgotten by the young scholar of Balliol. In Stanley's very striking prize poem " The Gipsies," written in 1837, ^^ adapted to the heroic measure a line from the introduction in blank verse to " The Palace of Art," and quoted the words without the author's name in a note.
In a paper on John Keble he tells us how as the Professor of Poetry went thro' the poem before recitation with him, he noticed the quotation and passed on, saying '' Shakespeare I suppose."
In the three or four terms which I had spent at Oxford I remember also myself translating into Latin Elegiacs in February 1 84 1, from a printed copy, the last three stanzas of the lines to J. S. beginning with " Words weaker than your grief," etc. They were in the possession of my private tutor E. Massey of Wadham, a distinguished Shrewsbury scholar, whose Cambridge friends may possibly have suggested their use for such a purpose. Otherwise I cannot recall anyone at Oxford before the publica- tion of the two volumes ever mentioning your father's poems. We talked much of Keble on the one hand, Shelley and Byron on the other, and some of us I need not say were strong Words-
1842] HIS UNWORLDLINESS. 207
worthians and were half-amused, half-indignant at the tendency of some of our undergraduate friends to depreciate Milton as a Puritan poet; but the intense interest called out by the two volumes seems to me, on looking back, to have taken my young contemporaries at Oxford as well as the outside world of readers as it were by storm. I seem still to hear voices that have long since been silent repeating line after line, which I can hardly read even now without recalling the very accent and the faces of friends of " days that are no more."
Aubrey de Vere writes :
It was in 1841 or 1842 that I first met the Poet^ on whom and on whose works my imagination had rested so often during the preceding ten years; and I lost nothing when the living man stood before me. The large dark eyes, generally dreamy but with an occasional gleam of imaginative alertness, the dusky, almost Spanish complexion, the high-built head and the massive abundance of curling hair like the finest and blackest silk, are still before me, and no less the stalwart form, strong " with the certain step of man," though some years earlier it might have moved
Still hither thither idly sway'd
Like those long mosses in the stream.
Whenever we were both in London, I met him as often as I could, sometimes at the rooms of James Spedding, or at some late smoking-party consisting of young men, their intimates at the University, the well-known Cambridge "Apostles." That was a society unvexed by formalities ; and I do not remember that my new friend and I ever called each other otherwise than by our Christian names. He was thus always called by many of his intimates beside; for their afifection for him partook largely of domestic affection in its character. He was pre- eminently a man^ as well as a genius, but not the least the man of the world. He was essentially refined; but convention fled before his face. At none of those reunions did I meet any of his brothers, though in later years I knew Frederick, many of whose poems were much admired by Henry Taylor as well as by myself. Unfortunately I never met his brother
* See Appendix, p. 501, for " The Reception of the Early Poems," by Aubrey dc Vere,
208 REMINISCENCES OF TENNYSON IN EARLY DAYS. [l842
Charles, who early published a slender volume of Sonnets warmly praised by Coleridge. My father had greatly admired one on the sea —
"The lightest murmur of its seething foam," etc.
The entire simplicity and unconventionality of Alfred Ten- nyson was part of the charm which bound his friends to him. No acquaintance, however inferior to him in intellect, could be afraid of him. He felt that he was not in the presence of a critic, but of one who respected human nature wherever he found it free from unworthiness, who would think his own thoughts whether in the society of ordinary or extraordinary men, and who could not but express them plainly if he spoke at all. That perfect transparency of mind, like the clearness of air in the finest climates, when it is nearness not distance that "lends enchantment to the view," I have seen only in three men beside him, Wordsworth, Sir William Rowan Hamilton and one other. His unguardedness, in combination with his unworldliness, made his friends all the more zealous to help him; and perhaps their emulous aid was more useful to him than self-help could have been. His friends' appreciation of his poetry too was an enthusiasm ardent enough to carry with it a healthful infection. It forced others to give his works an earlier attention than would otherwise have been their lot, and consequently an earlier recognition; but it was the genuine merit of his poetry which produced that enthusiasm and pre- vented it from cooling while the wise were forming their judg- ments, and the wiseacres were depreciating minor poets and confounding him with them. Friends could but raise the sail high enough to catch what breeze might be stirring. The rest depended on the boat. It seems strange however that his larger fame made way so slowly. For many a year, we, his zealots, were but zealots of a sect. Seventeen years after the publication of his first volume, and five more after that of his third, " The Princess," came out, I wrote a critique in one of our chief Quarterlies, and called him a " great poet." The then Editor struck out " great " and substituted " true." He considered that the public would not tolerate so strong an eulogium.
Alfred Tennyson's largeness of mind and of heart was touch- ingly illustrated by his reverence for Wordsworth's poetry, not- withstanding that the immense merits which he recognised in
1842] VISITS WORDSWORTH AT HAMPSTEAD. 209
it were not, in his opinion, supplemented by a proportionate amount of artistic skill. He was always glad to show reverence to the "Old Poet," not then within ten years of the age at which the then younger one died. " Wordsworth," he said to me one day, "is staying at Hampstead in the house of his friend Mr. Hoare ; I must go and see him ; and you must come with me ; mind you do not tell Rogers, or he will be displeased at my being in London and not going to see him." We drove up to Hampstead, and knocked at the door; and the next minute it was opened by the Poet of the World, at whose side stood the Poet of the Mountains. Rogers' old face, which had encountered nearly ninety years, seemed to double the number of its wrinkles as he said, not angrily but very drily : " Ah, you did not come up the hill to see me ! " During the visit it was with Tennyson that the Bard of Rydal held discourse, while the recluse of St James' Place, whom " that angle " especially delighted, conversed with me. As we walked back to London through grassy fields not then built over, Tennyson complained of the old Poet's coldness. He had endeavoured to stimulate some latent ardours by telling him of a tropical island where the trees, when they first came into leaf, were a vivid scarlet ; — " Every one of them, I told him, one flush all over the island, the colour of blood ! It would not do. I could not inflame his imagination in the least!" During the preceding year I had had the great honour of passing several days at Rydal Mount with Wordsworth, walking on his mountains and listening to him at his fireside. I told him that a young poet had lately risen up. Wordsworth answered that he feared from the little he had heard that if Crabbe was the driest of poets, the young aspirant must have the opposite fault. I replied that he should judge for himself, and without leave given, recited to him two poems by Tennyson : viz. " You ask me, why, tho* ill at ease," and " Of old sat Freedom on the heights." Wordsworth listened with a gradually deepening attention. After a pause he an- swered, "I must acknowledge that these two poems are very solid and noble in thought. Their diction also seems singularly stately 1."
^ Some of the critics state that before these poems appeared, no modem
poet had undertaken the hard task of setting forth with poetic fire and glow
the golden mean of politics. Tennyson^s view was that a poet ought to love
his own country, but that he should found his political poems on what was
T, I. 14
2IO REMINISCENCES OF TENNYSON IN EARLY DAYS. [l842
There was another occasion on which the Poet whose great work was all but finished, and the youthful compeer whose chief labours were yet to come, met in my presence. It was at a dinner given by Mr Moxon. The ladies had withdrawn, and Wordsworth soon followed them. Several times Tennyson said to me in a low voice, " I must go : I cannot wait any longer." At last the cause of his disquiet revealed itself. It was painful to him to leave the house without expressing to the old Bard his sense of the obligation which all Englishmen owed to him, and yet he was averse to speak his thanks before a large com- pany. Our host brought Wordsworth back to the dining-room ; and Tennyson moved up to him. He spoke in a low voice, and with a perceptible emotion. I must not cite his words lest I should mar them ; but they were few, simple and touching. The old man looked very much pleased, more so indeed than I ever saw him look on any other occasion ; shook hands with him heartily, and thanked him affectionately. Wordsworth thus records the incident in a letter to his accomplished American friend. Professor Reed : " I saw Tennyson when I was in London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent ^"
Our many conversations, in those pleasant years, turned chiefly on Poetry, a subject on which Tennyson could say nothing that was not original. It was easy to see that to discern the Beautiful in all around us, and to reveal that beauty to others, was his special poetic vocation. In these conversations he never uttered a word that was disparaging, or tainted with the spirit of rivalship. One of the Poets least like himself, Crabbe, was among those whose merits he affirmed most un- equivocally, especially his gift of a hard pathos. The only poet I heard him criticise roughly or unfairly was himself. " Compare," he once said to me, " compare the heavy handling of my work- manship with the exquisite lightness of touch in Keats ! " Another time he read aloud a song by one of the chivalrous Poets of Charles the First's time, perhaps Lovelace's " Althea," which Wordsworth also used to croon in the woods, and said, " There ! I would give
noble and great m the history of all countries, and that his utterances should be outspoken, yet statesmanlike, without any colour of partizanship.
1 Prosi Works of WilUam Wordsworth^ Vol. ni., p. 391 . Dr Grosart
1842] VARIOUS ESTIMATES OF BURNS* POETRY, 211
all my poetry to have made one song like that ! " Not less ardent was his enthusiasm for Bums. And here an incident with no small significance recurs to me. " Read the exquisite songs of Bums/' he exclaimed. " In shape, each of them has the perfection of the berry ; in light the radiance of the dewdrop : you forget for its sake those stupid things, his serious pieces!" The same day I met Wordsworth, and named Bums to him. Wordsworth praised him, even more vehemently than Tennyson had done, as the great genius who had brought Poetry back to Nature ; but ended, " Of course I refer to his serious efforts, such as the * Cotter's Saturday Night * ; those foolish little amatory songs of his one has to forget." I told the tale to Henry Taylor that evening ; and his answer was : " Bums* ex- quisite songs and Burns' serious efforts are to me alike tedious,- and disagreeable reading I " So much for the infallibility of Poets in their own art !
CHAPTER X.
LETTERS. 1 842- 1 845.
From Samuel Rogers.
St James' Place, August \iih^ 1842. My dear Tennyson,
Every day have I resolved to write and tell you with what delight I have read and read again your two beautiful volumes; but it was my wish to tell you so face to face. That wish however remains unfulfilled and write I must, for very few things, if any, have ever thrilled me so much.
Yours ever, S. Rogers.
To Edmund Lushington.
Sept. Stk, 1842. My dear Edmund,
• • « « «
I called on Moxon, not at home, gone to the Pyrenees with W. Wordsworth's two sons. 500 of my books are sold : according to Moxon's brother I have made a sensation ! I wish the wood-works ^ would make a sensation 1 I expect they will. I came here this morning by the Liverpool packet. I go to Limerick
^ This was Dr AUen^s manii£au:tory for carving wood, in which my hther had invested all his little money. Full details of this are given on p. 220.
212
1842] CARLYLE AND THE POEMS. 213
to-night, I hope you are all blooming. What with ruin in the distance and hypochondriacs in the foreground God help all. Pray write to me at P. O.
Love to all yours and mine.
Yours ever, A. T.
From Thomas Carlyle.
Cheyne Road, Chelsea.
Ith Dec, 1843. Dear Tennyson,
Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your Poems ; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them over and over till they become my poems : this fact, with the inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what my relation has been to the thing caird English " Poetry " for many years back, you would think such fact almost surprising ! Truly it is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man's heart as I do in this same. A right valiant, true fighting, victorious heart ; strong as a lion's, yet gentle, loving and full of music : what I call a genuine singer's heart ! there are tones as of the nightingale ; low murmurs as of wood-doves at summer noon ; everywhere a noble sound as of the free winds and leafy woods. The sunniest glow of Life dwells in that soul, chequered duly with dark streaks from night and Hades : everywhere one feels as if all were fiU'd with yellow glowing sunlight, some glorious golden Vapour; from which form after form bodies itself ; naturally, golden forms. In one word, there seems to be a note of " The Eternal Melodies " in this man ; for which let all other men be thankful and joyful ! Your " Dora " remmds me of the Book of Ruth ; in the " Two Voices," which I am told some Reviewer calls " trivial morality," I think of passages in Job. For truth is quite true in Job's time and Ruth's as now. I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in your " Summer Oak " a beautiful kindred to some- thing that is best in Goethe ; I mean his " Miillerinn " (Miller's
214 LETTERS 1842-1845. [l842
daughter) chiefly, with whom the very Mill-dam gets in love ; tho' she proves a flirt after all and the thing ends in satirical lines! very strangely too in the "Vision of Sin" I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not babble, it is speech ; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so I say let us all rejoice somewhat And so let us all smite rhythmically, all in concert, " the sounding furrows " ; and sail forward with new cheer, "beyond the sunset," whither we are bound —
It may be that the g^lfs will wash us down, It may be we shall touch the happy Isles And see the great Achilles whom we knew!
These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would All whole Lachrymatories as I read. But do you, when you return to London, come down to me and let us smoke a pipe together. With few words, with many, or with none, it need not be an ineloquent Pipe I
Farewell, dear Tennyson; may the gods be good to you. With very great sincerity (and in great haste) I subscribe myself
Yours, T. Carlyle.
My father tells his sister Emily to copy this letter and enclose it to my mother. Emily writes as follows :
I like this letter, dost not thou.^ I asked Alfred what Carlyle meant by saying he could not read German, and he said, when the poems he (i.e. Carlyle) alluded to were written he knew little or nothing of German. He must have told Carlyle this who has made a jumble. Moreover Alfred says, ''Carlyle is mistaken about the satirical lines, concluding the * Miillerinn.' They are in another poem."
Thy very affectionate Emily.
From Sara Coleridge ^ to Edward Moxon {enclosed
to my father in a letter from Moxon).
1842. My dear Sir,
My husband and I have very often had to thank you
for additions to our library most kindly made. Your last gift
is a most acceptable one and supplies me with a rich treat for
1 The only and highly-gifted daughter of S. T. Coleridge.
1842] THE PATENT CARVING COMPANY. 21 $
days to come, and one which I need not devour too greedily, but can recur to from time to time with fresh pleasure. It is a compliment (as far as admiration of mine can be compli- mentary) to Mr Tennyson, that having laid hold of the first volume, containing poems which I had read over and over again a few years ago, I could not part with it for the new productions, much as my curiosity had been excited about them, but fell to reading my old favourites with even greater admiration than ever.
What I have read of the second volume will sustain the author's reputation, which is much to say. The Epic is what might have been expected, not epical at all but very beautiful, in Tennyson's old manner.
" The Gardener's Daughter " is most highly wrought and still more to be admired I think than the " Morte d' Arthur."
4
Accept best thanks both from Mr Coleridge and myself and believe me
Very sincerely yours, Sara Coleridge.
71? iAe Rev. H. D. Rawnsley.
1843. My dear Rawnsley,
Your note dated the 5 th only reached me last night (eleven days after date) at this place, Torquay, Devon. Dr Allen did not forward it immediately as he ought to have done, in fact in the multiplicity of his business and his 40 letters a day I believe he had quite forgotten my direction, until I refresht his memory by sending it. How the wood-scheme goes on you ask. The concern I believe is going on very well ; there are as many orders as can be executed by our old presses ; we have been modelling presses all this time. They sent one from Brummagem, wretched thing 1 split as soon as put into action (I hear that all Brummagem machinery is of the worst description : let Brummagem look to it or she will ruin her reputation), but Wood has succeeded in making really quite a beautiful press which will do as much work in the same time as two of the old ones.
2l6 LETTERS 1842-1845. [l842
And now (as we have it on the pattern) we are going to have one made a week, till we have enough. We shall go on swimmingly. The presses have been modelling, and the men educating up till now, for after all (simple as it seems) it is a very delicate process to manage properly, and we want a great many workmen.
I have written in great haste, and I know not whether your queries are answer'd ; if not, write again and ask me what you wish to know. We have dropt the name " Pyroglyph " as too full of meaning (a singular reason for rejecting a word !), and call ourselves "The Patent Decorative Carving and Sculpture Company ! " Be care- ful! I told you all about it on the score of old friend- ship and auld lang syne. Poor Sophy! I am deeply grieved to hear of her illness.
Drummond's affair ' is no secret to me for I accused him of it in your little study and the sort of denial he made was as good as a confession, and I have since heard of it from other quarters : these things never are secrets in the country.
You never heard the word "ivy-tod "; but you have heard of " tods of wool," and I take it they are the same words originally, a certain weight or mass of something.
Kindest love to all your party.
Ever yours in great haste, A. T.
Torquay, Devon.
I shall most likely leave this place for town in a few days. You had better, therefore, if you write again write to London. Farewell. I have had so little time, I am afraid I have written a very confused letter.
^ Drummond Rawnsley^s engagement to Catherine Franklin, daughter of Su* Willingham Franklin, and niece of Sir John Franklin.
1843] LETTERS TO AUBREY DE VERE. 21 7
To Aubrey de Vere.
Eastbourne. Saturday^ July 30M, 1842.
My dear Aubrey,
As for dining with your uncle, that, you see, is out of the question, as your note has just been delivered to me at this place, Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast. I shall account myself highly honoured in receiv- ing a copy of " Edwin the Fair " from Henry Taylor ; these are not empty words : therefore I underscore them : likewise your edited book will, I have no doubt, yield me much pleasure. I shall be about a week longer at this place, and if you send the parcel hither directed 22 Sea- houses, Eastbourne, it will go far to relieve the tedium of a watering-place.
Ever yours, A. T.
To Aubrey de Vere.
Victoria Hotel, Killarney. September^ 1842.
My dear Aubrey,
I am sorry you had the fruitless trouble of calling at the Temple ^ I tried hard to find you out in: London but did not succeed. Partly from indisposition and partly from business and that of a nature the most unpleasant ^ I was kept at Boxley far longer than I wished or expected, so long indeed that I have hardly any time left for Ireland, as in a day or two I must again set out for Boxley. I have only just got your letter to me out of the Killarney Post Office. Christie, the member, found it in L.'s rooms, and brought it to Chapman, who sent it to Edmund Lushington, who sent
^ I Mitre Court Buildings : F. Lushington^s rooms where he often lodged. * When the wood-carving company had begun to fail.
2l8 LETTERS 1842-1845. [l843
it to my people who sent it to me. Now if that sentence has not taken away your breath, make my apologies to your cousin and beg her not to hate me because I never seem to accept an invitation of hers. I suppose you are yet in Blandford Square, to which accordingly I send this note. I do not know that, if you were here, I should have time to come.
I have been to your Ballybunion caves but could not get into the finest on account of the weather. I was obliged to give Dingle up from want of time, tho' I much wished to see it, and I am afraid I must forgo Glengarry likewise.
A. T.
I can find no further account of this visit to Ireland, except that my father then made the following lines, which occur in " Merlin and Vivien," within one of the caves of Ballybunion:
So dark a forethought roU'd about his brain. As on a dull day in an Ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence.
To James Spedding.
January 25/^, 1843.
Dear James,
I send you a sketch of Mablethorpe. I was wrong about the muffin-man, he comes o' Saturdays and I can likewise get letters on Tuesdays, those being market-days at Alford and churls going. Don't forget the AthetuBum. I send the sketch to melt your heart. Impart what booksellers' news there may be and re- member me to Fitz, if in town.
Ever yours, A. T.
1843] LETTER FROM CHARLES DICKENS. 219
He also writes to Moxon from Mablethorpe : " There is nothing here but myself and two starfish ; therefore, if you have any stray papers which you do not know what to do with, as you once told me, they would be manna in the wilderness to me."
From Charles Dickens^ sent with a copy of
his ''Worksr
Devonshire Terrace,
March 10th , 1843.
My DEAR Tennyson,
For the love I bear you as a man whose writings enlist my whole heart and nature in admiration of their Truth and Beauty, set these books upon your shelves ; believing that you have no more earnest and sincere homage than mine.
Faithfully and Gratefully your Friend,
Charles Dickens.
To Aubrey de Vere.
9r Leonard's, Sept. 11 th^ 1843.
My dear Aubrey,
I received your letter, but not in time to answer by return of post, and as you purposed setting out next day, I do not know whether it were worth while writing to you at all : perhaps you may get my note somewhere in Italy ; as it contains nothing, you will be hurt at sight of an English postmark on a pithless scrawl. I am sorry to hear of Henry Taylor's ill-health, but I have good faith in warm suns and leisure. You are quite unforgiveable in your perpetual assumption of my nonchalance as to whatever you write. Why you do always so assume, and what reason I can have given you for such an error on your part, is to me hidden in black cloud. You should have sent your proofs. It is quite
220 LETTERS 1 842- 1 845. [l844
true that you have heard me say that I was sometimes
bored by Mr E and others ; but why you should be
so ultra-humble as to mass yourself along with these, and dream you range no higher in my andrometer. is beyond my following. Peace be with such fancies, that is, I hope they are dead and over them the " hie jacent " of all futurity. Thank you however for the book.
I am down here at St Leonard's with the Lushing- tons ; there are smooth seas and hot weather, and I wish you were with me. Good-bye, and don't be angry at this scrapling.
Ever yours, A. Tennyson.
On July 13th, 1844, Moxon wrote that Tom Campbell had died at Boulogne. My father missed him, for he was a kind-hearted man and a brilliant talker in a tSte-k-tete ; and very good-natured whenever they met, as not un- frequently chanced, at the different clubs.
That the following letter should be understood, it is necessary to explain why my father had fallen ill. Dr Allen, who has been already mentioned, was a physician near Beech Hill, with whom the Tennyson family had become acquainted, and who had either conceived, or had adopted, the idea of wood-carving by machinery. At all events he inspired the Tennysons with so great an enthusiasm for it, that by degrees he persuaded my father to give him the money for which, wearied by a careless agent, he had sold his little estate in Grasby, Lincolnshire, and even the ;^5oo left him as a legacy by Arthur Hallam's aunt. Not merely this however, — since, but for my father's intervention ap- parently, all the property of such of the family as were at Beech Hill would have been merged in this philanthropic undertaking; so fascinating was the prospect of oak panels and oak furniture carved by machinery, thus
1844] ILLNESS AND HYDROPATHY. 221
brought by its cheapness within the reach of the multitude.
The confidence my father had placed in the " earnest- frothy" Dr Allen proved to be misplaced. The entire project collapsed: my father's worldly goods were all gone, and a portion of the property of his brothers and sisters. Then followed a season of real hardship, and many trials for my father and mother, since marriage seemed to be further oflf than ever. So severe a hypo- chondria set in upon him that his friends despaired of his life. "I have," he writes, "drunk one of those most bitter draughts out of the cup of life, which go near to make men hate the world they move in." My uncle Edmund Lushington in 1844 generously insured Dr Allen's life for part of the debt due to my father ; the Doctor died in January 1845.
To Edmund Lushington.
Cheltenham, July 29M, 1844.
My dear Edmund,
I ought certainly to have written before, but I don't know how it is, I cannot abide letter writing. Many letters have I conceived to you tho' brought forth none. In the first stages of Hydropathy (under Dr Jephson) I found it quite impossible to write, I could not turn my hand to anything and now I am not much better. I shall have to go into the system again and carry it out to the end. It is true I had ten crisises but I am not cured, tho' I do not doubt of the efficiency of the treatment in most cases, having seen most marvellous cures performed. I am going to town to-morrow for two or three days. I want among other things to see the exhibition and this is its last week. I have seen no Art, and my soul thirsts for it, for a year. I fear it would be
222 LETTERS 1 842- 1 845. [lM4
too expensive to come on to Eastbourne, and you are not at Park House, and will not be perhaps for a fortnight or three weeks. At any rate I shall hope to see you at Cheltenham. Perhaps with Harry's leave I shall try to get Geraldine to give me a bed in his rooms. I have walked thrice up Snowdon which I found much easier to accomplish than walking on level ground.
London. I arrived last night at the old Hummums at 1 1 o'clock : called on Spedding, to my great disappoint- ment he had left town ; called on Chapman, door sported, no answer to repeated applications at his no-knockered portal.
Love to Cissy and the rest.
Ever yours, A. T.
During this visit to London Savile Morton wrote to Mrs Brotherton that he had "come across Alfred Tennyson." " We looked out some Latin translations of his poems by Cambridge men, and read some poems of Leigh Hunt's, and some of Theocritus and Virgil. It is delightful to have a passage picked out for one to admire by him. Seeing through his eyes much enlarges one's view. He has the power of impressing you with the greatness of what he admires and bringing out its meaning. I had no idea Virgil could ever sound so fine as it did by his reading.. ..Yesterday I went to see him again. After some chat we sat down in two separate rooms to read ElUn Middleton, by Lady Georgiana FuUerton — very highly spoken of." In another letter he says: "Seeing Alfred has been a diversion to me.... I never met a heart so large and full of love."
In November my father was again at Cheltenham, and wrote to Edward Moxon :
I want you to get me a book which I see ad- vertised in the Examiner: it seems to contain many
1846] LETTERS TO MOXON AND FITZGERALD. 223
speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem. The book is called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation^ y and published by J. Churchill, Princes St. Soho; the price 7^. 6^., but you can get it cheaper.
Another book I long very much to see is that on the superiority of the modern painters to the old ones, and the greatness of Turner as an artist, by an Oxford under- graduate I think *. I do not much wish to buy it, it may be dear ; perhaps you could borrow it for me out of the London Library, or from Rogers. I saw it lying on his table. I would promise to take care of it, and send it back in due time. At any rate let me have the other. Kind remembrances to Mrs and Miss Moxon and the little one to boot.
To Edward Fitzgerald.
Tuesday Night
10 St James' Square, Cheltenham, Jan. iJ^th, 1845.
Mv DEAR FiTZ,
I had heard the news *. No gladness crossed my heart but sorrow and pity : that's not theatrical but the truth ; wherefore bear with me, tho' perhaps it may seem a little out of the tide of things. Now will you be at 19 C. S. to-morrow or the day after? I am coming up to see you, and shall arrive most probably between
^ The sections of '' In Memoriam " about Evolution had been read by his friends some years before the publication of the Vestiges of Creation in 1844. Of natural selection Romanes writes, ''In 'In Memoriam^ Tennyson noted the izct, and a few years later Darwin supplied the explanation.^' Darwin and after Darwin^ Romanes.
^ Ruskin's first volume of Modern Painters,
' The reference in this letter is to the death of Dr Allen.
224 LETTERS 1842-1845. [l846
9 and lo pjn., when I trust I shall find you well and thriving.
Ever yours, A. T.
From Henry Hallam {enclosing Sir Robert
Peel's letter).
Wraxaix Lodge, near Bristol.
Sept 24M, 1845. My dear Tennyson,
You will believe that it is with the greatest pleasure I enclose to you the letter I have this day received from Sir R. Peel.
I think you will have no hesitation about answering it to him^ nothing can be more flattering or delicate.
We want to learn more about Emily herself. Can she not ever write herself ? The last we heard was that she had left Cheltenham, yet this can hardly be.
We have been for some months here and shall continue till the beginning of December ; if you ever wander this way, we shall be very glad to give you a dinner and bed ; and I have both glades and distant views to show you.
Believe me yours very truly,
H. Hallam.
From the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel to
Alfred Tennyson.
I rejoice that you have enabled me to fulfil the intentions of Parliament by advising the Crown to confer a mark of Royal Favour^ on one who has devoted to worthy purposes great intellectual powers.
The Queen has cordially approved of the recommendation which on the receipt of your letter I humbly offered to Her Majesty.
^ Pension of j£200 annually.
1846] LORD HOUGHTON AND CARLYLE. 22$
I have more than once heard Lord Houghton and my father talk together of Peel as a man and a states- man; and on those occasions Lord Houghton would invariably relate the story of his interview with Carlyle about the pension, given in Wemyss Reid's Life and here reprinted.
"Richard Milnes," said Carlyle one day, withdrawing his pipe from his mouth, as they were seated together in the little house in Cheyne Row, " when are you going to get that pension for Alfred Tennyson ? "
" My dear Carlyle," responded Milnes, " the thing is not so easy as you seem to suppose. What will my constituents say if I do get the pension for Tennyson? They know nothing about him or his poetry, and they will probably think he is some poor relation of my own, and that the whole affair is a job."
Solemn and emphatic was Carlyle's response. "Richard Milnes, on the Day of Judgment, when the Lord asks you why you didn't get that pension for Alfred Tennyson, it will not do to lay the blame on your constituents ; it is you that will be damned."
The question arose whether Sheridan Knowles or my father should be placed on the pension list. Peel knew nothing of either of them. Houghton said that he then made Peel read " Ulysses," "whereupon the pension was granted to Tennyson."
My father wrote then to his old friend, Rawnsley :
Cheltenham, 1845.
My dear Rawnsley,
I was delighted to see your handwriting again. I thought you had given me up as a bad job, for I remember that I once very flagitiously did not answer a very kind letter of yours long long ago : and truly my love for my friends must not be measured by the quantity of black and white into which I put it: for, however
T. L IS
226 LETTERS 1 842- 1 845. [l846
appearances are against me, I h4ive a love for old Lincolnshire faces and things which will stick by me as long as I live. As to visiting you I wish I could, but I am engaged to Hallam, who has a country house in the neighbourhood of Bristol, and it is an engagement of some standing, and thither am I going as soon as ever I recover from the worst cold I ever caught since I was a Somersby suckling. It has kept me half-deaf for a month. I got it one wet night at Chelsea, when I went to see Mr. Carlyle. The better half of the Carlyle was then in Scotland. He, by the bye, is about to publish a book which you had better get in your book club — all the letters of Oliver Cromwell that can be got at, connected with a short narration or commentary of his own. Oliver is Carlyle's^ God, the greatest of great men, and he intends if he can to sweep ofif all the royalist cobwebs that have hitherto obscured his fair fame.
I am glad to hear of your quadrilling at Homcastle. There is something pleasant in the notion of your figur- ing in L'Ete with all your hood fluttering about you, and I respect a man who can keep his heart green when the snows of Time begin to whiten his head : not that I mean to say your head is white, but the silver hair may intrude " obiter," tho' as far as I recollect you had a very stout black crop when I saw you last. I should like to have been amongst you as in old times but
" The days are awa that we hae seen,"
and I begin to feel an old man myself. I have gone thro' a vast deal of suffering (as to money difficulties in my family etc.) since I saw you last, and would not live it over again for quadruple the pension Peel has given me and on which you congratulate me. Well, I suppose I ought in a manner to be grateful. I have done nothing
1 My father would rally Carlyle on his '^ might is right ** and ^ one man ** theories.
1846] THE PENSION. 227
slavish to get it : I never even solicited for it either by myself or thro' others. It was all done for me without word or hint from me, and Peel tells me I " need not by it be fettered in the public expression of any opinion I choose to take up " ; so, if I take a pique against the Queen, or the Court, or Peel himself, I may, if I will, bully them with as much freedom, tho' not perhaps quite so gracefully, as if I were still unpensioned. Something in that word " pension " sticks in my gizzard ; it is only the name, and perhaps would " smell sweeter " by some other. I feel the least bit possible Miss Martineauish about it. You know she refused one, saying she " should be robbing the people who did not make laws for themselves " : however that is nonsense : her non-accept- ance of the pension did not save the people a stiver, and meantime (what any one would have thought must have been more oflfensive to her feelings) her friends sub- scribed for her and kept her from want. If the people did make laws for themselves, if these things went by universal suffrage, what literary man ever would get a lift, it being known that the mass of Englishmen have as much notion of poetry as I of fox-hunting? Meantime there is some meaning in having a gentleman and a classic at the head of afifairs, who may now and then direct the stream of public bounty to us, poor devils, whom the Grundyites would not only not remunerate, but kick out of society as barely respectable; for Calliope herself, as I have heard, never kept a gig but walks barefoot about the sacred hill, no better than an Irish- woman.
I wish the causelessly bitter against me and mine no worse punishment than that they could read the very flattering letter Peel wrote me; let us leave them in their limbo
*' Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e Qa:^^^^"
a 28 LETTESS 1842-1845. [1046
Peel's letter I would send you if I had it, but I have sent it to Hallam, and told him to keep it till I see him. I wrote to Rogers thanking him for his kindness. I thought he must have been mentioning me to Peel. He wrote me back a very pretty answer which I send Sophy for an autograph of the old Bard ; would any one think that pretty little hand was written by a man somewhere between eighty and ninety?
Now, Sophy, if as a matron you do not care for autographs, or intend to lose it or give it away, why let me have it back again for I have some value for it ; particularly as the old man and I fell out one wet day in Pall Mall about half a year ago, when I said something that offended him, and his face flushed and he plucked his arm out of mine and told me I was " affecting the smart," and since then I haven't seen him. How is " Mamma," you do not say a word about her health and I want to know, for she was always like a mother to me ? I wonder whether she recollects my playing the drunken son at Bristol. Many a pleasant talk have I had with her, and I much regret that I cannot come and see you now. Tell Mundy I retain a lively recollection of his puns ; and remember me to Coltman (George I mean), who always seemed to me a real good fellow. I recollect his sending me, when I lived at Boxley, a book of poems by a friend. I forget now what my answer was, but I hope I said nothing to hurt him or his friend's feelings. If you knew what a nuisance these volumes of verse are ! Rascals send me their's per post from America, and I have more than once been knocked up out of bed to pay three or four shillings for books of which I can't get thro' one page, for of all books the most insipid reading is second-rate verse. Blue books, red books, almanacks, peerages, anything is better. See ! how I keep chatter- ing, just as if I were sitting by your fireside, in the little book-room, pipe in hand.
1846] "A YOUNG JUPITER." 229
I shall not be in London in November, for I have only just returned from thence, but do you never by any chance mean to come and visit us ? Are we in these days, who live East and West, to be as badly off as if we lived one at each Ind, or in the heart of the eighteenth century ? Come and see us, you can do it some time, going to or from the Hallidays, and we shall be at least as glad to see you as they. Why- don't you clip a few days from them and let us have the advantage ? Here is a handsome town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants, a polka-parson-worshipping place, of which the Rev. Francis Close is Pope, besides pumps and pumprooms, chalybeates, quadrilles (as you have taken to them again), and one of the prettiest countries in Great Britain. My mother would be delighted to see you, and the girls would coax you, and make so much of you, you would feel yourself in a new planet. Edmund Lushington and Cissy have been with us and have just gone on to Glasgow. Their little one looks like a young Jupiter with his head full of Greek: but she, poor thing, was out of health, and dreaded the winter in Glasgow, which does not agree with her.
Tell Edward and Drummond that I expected thein to have called on me the day after I met them at Moxon's, and I was very savage. Remember me to them with all kindness and to " Mamma " and Sophy ; and not me only but all of us here to all of you there (if that's sense).
Now dinner's ready and I must say Good bye.
Ever yours affectionately,
A. Tennyson.
CHAPTER XI.
SWITZERLAND 1846, AND LETTERS 1846-47.
Journal kept in Manuscript-book of ^^Princess^
(^Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height** was written
during this tour among the Alps.)
1846. Went on a tour to the Isle of Wight and in August to Switzerland with Edward Moxon.
August 2nd. Up at 4 to go by " Princess Maude." Picturesque sunrise from the pier. Bruges. Englishman with moustache told us of festival at Bruges. I go down into fore-cabin and get the very worst breakfast I ever had in my life. Arrival at Ostend. Order from Belgian king that no passports need be shown. Inhuman conduct and supererogatory fury of porters. We lose our presence of mind and run for it, but there is plenty of time. Arrive at Bruges, walk to Hotel de B16, recommended by moustached Englishman, missing the conveyance thitherward, which, marked with gilt letters Fleur de Bl€, rolls by us as we near our hotel. Great rejoicings of the people and hero-worship of Simon
1846 J TOUR IN SWITZERLAND. 23 1
Stevin \ S on the banners, and names, busts and statues of all the Flanders great men, statesmen, sculptors, poets, etc. in an inner square within the great square. Horse- men riding in a circle for prize. High tower and clock in great square, picturesque groups in Cathedral, motioned from the seats we had taken opposite pulpit, depart to F. de Bl^, dinner in salle — affected Englishwoman whom I took for Beige or German opposite, hot nervous night with me. Man "hemmed" overhead enough to shake the walls of Jericho.
August yrd. Off to Grand Hotel de Flandre, monkey, pleasant folk, commissionaire, pharmacien and opticien. J. Arteveld's house, town-hall very fine, mus^e not good, go to Lou vain. Hotel de Su^de, new town-hall, old cafe, row of poplars, nervous night
August ^th. Off to Li^ge, two sons of Sir Robert Peel, Hotel d'Angleterre good, money changed, too soon for rail which came very late, pretty scenery, Chaudefontaine, old man and little boy, railway bordered with young acacias. Cologne, Hotel de Cologne, rooms overlooking moonlit Rhine, hotel full of light and festival, pillaring its lights in the quiet water, bridge of boats, three steamers lying quietly below windows, not quite four hours' sleep.
August $tA. Woke at 5 or earlier, clash and clang, of steamboat departure under me, walk on the quay,. Cathedral splendid but to my mind too narrow for its length.
"Caspar and Melchior and Balthazar Came to Cologne on the broad-breasted Rhine And founded there a temple which is yet A fragment, but the wonder of the world."
^ Born in the sixteenth century at Bruges, and a great mathematician and mechanic.
232 SWITZERLAND 1846. [l846
Embark, the bore of the Rhine, three Hyde Park drawling snobs, deck very hot, Nonnenwerth and Drach- enfels, sad recollections; Coblentz, horrid row, king of Holland, shuffled ofif to the Rheinischerhof, stupid hotel. Coblentz as hateful as it was long years before, over the bridge to the Cheval Blanc, coffee there, back again, the bridge opening islanded us in the river.
August tth. Ofif again by boat, three drawlers de- parted at Mainz, talk about language with Germans, sad old city of Worms among poplars, reach Mannheim, H6tel de I'Europe, take a dark walk among shrubberies with M.
August jth. Early next morning off by rail to Kehl, confusion about the two railways, douane, stop and see Cathedral, nave magnificent, rail to Basle, Three Kings, green swift Rhine roaring against the piers, Swiss fountain.
August StA. Caf€ in room, ofif by diligence to Lucerne, vines, agreeable Swiss young lady to whom
1 quoted Goethe and she spouted William Tell^ sorry to lose her, see Righi and Pilatus in the distance, walk before diligence but get in again, pass bridge over swift green stream, bureau, go to Schweizerhof, room at top of house, look out in the night and see the lake marbled with clouds, gabble of servants, bad night.
August ^th. Walk up the hill above the town, churchyard, innumerable gilt crosses, go to a villa, lie on the grass, return a different way from M., cross a part of the lake, walk back.
August lot A. Strolled about the painted bridges, M. met his friend, we bought Keller's map, off by
2 o'clock steamer to Weggis, hired a horse up the Righi, looked over and saw the little covers and wooded shores and villages under vast red ribs of rock, very fine, dis- missed my horse at the Bains where we entered with an Englishman and found peasants waltzing, gave two
1840] RETURN TO ENGLAND. 233
francs to boy who had ordered beds, summit, crowd of people, very feeble sunset, tea, infernal chatter as of innumerable apes.
August nth. Sunrise, strange look of clouds packed on the lake of Egeri, far ofif Jungfrau looking as if delicately pencilled. Rossberg, Kiissnacht, breakfast, began to descend at 9, strange aspect of hill, cloud, and snow, as if the mountains were on fire, watch the clouds opening and shutting as we go down, and making framed pictures of the lake, etc., long hot descent, dined at Weggis, landlady takes me out to select live fish for dinner, I am too tender-hearted so we go without fish, boat touches, ofif to Fluelen, very sleepy, carriage road to Italy, Tell's chapel, go in to church, return to Sweiz- erhof.
August 12th. Lake, guide and boat to Alpnach, hire voiture up the vale of Sarnen, walk a little before, get in, nothing very remarkable, arrive at Lungern, pretty green Alpine " thai " shut in with steep clififs, one long waterfall, jolly old Radical who abused Dr Arnold, over the hills to Meyringen, home (after having seen Lauterbrunnen and the Bernese Alps, the best things in the tour).
To Edward Fitzgerald.
Cheltenham, Nov, 12/Si, 1846.
Well, Moxon went to Switzerland ; saw Blanc, he was very sulky, kept his nightcap on, dofif'd it one morning when I was knocked up out of bed to look at him at four o'clock, the glance I gave did not by any means repay me for the toil of travelling to see him. Two other things I did see in Switzerland, the stateliest bits of landskip
234 SWITZERLAND 1 846, AND LETTERS 1 846-47. [l846
I ever saw, one was a look down on the valley of Lauter- brunnen while we were descending from the Wengem Alp, the other a view of the Bernese Alps : don't think that I am going to describe them. Let it suffice that I was so satisfied with the size of crags that (Moxon being gone on before in vertigo and leaning on the arm of the guide) I laughed by myself. I was satisfied with the size of crags, but mountains, great mountains disappointed me. • • • • I called on Dickens at Lausanne who was very hospitable, and gave us biscuits (a rare luxury on the Continent, not such as are sweet and soft, but hard and unsweet) and a flask of Liebfraumilch, which is being interpreted "Virginis lac," as I dare say you know.
I have just got Festus ; order it and read. You will most likely find it a great bore, but there are really very grand things in Festus.
Ever thine, A. T.
Letters to Mrs Burton {the wife of the patron of Dr Tennyson! s living of Somersby).
1846. My dear Mrs Burton,
Nothing could be sweeter than Cathy's Somersby violets, and doubt not but that I shall keep them as a sacred treasure. The violets of one's native place gathered by the hands of a pure innocent child must needs be precious to me, and indeed I would have acknowledged the receipt of them and sent her a thou- sand loves and kisses before now, but there were several
1845] HIS LOVE OF CHILDREN. 235
reasons why I did not write which it is of no use troub- ling you with; only I pray you kiss her for me very sweetly on lip and cheek and forehead, and assure her of my gratitude. I love all children, but I loved little Cathy par excellence by a kind of instinct when I saw her first Do as you choose about the miniatures, but I am told that you have had illness in your house and it would make me uncomfortable to cause you any kind of trouble. I am here in London on a visit to a friend of mine at 6 Michael's Grove, Brompton. People fete and dine me every day but I am somewhat unwell and out of spirits : meanwhile I trust that your own health is improved, and that you are prosperous and happy. Farewell and believe me
Ever yours truly, A. Tennyson.
My dear Mrs Burton,
The miniatures which you have sent me we will treasure as precious memorials of our shortlived acquaintanceship: not that they do either you or the child full justice. Nature without doubt has been much more bountiful to you both than the artist : however the portraits are not unlike and moreover well-painted. I am sorry to learn from some fragments of your letter to Emily, which she read to me, that you are not altogether satisfied with the world about you. Pray keep up your spirits in the wilderness of Lincolnshire. I trust that we shall all meet again, and meanwhile may your New Year be happy. Truly do I wish it may be so. You know wise men say that our happiness lies in our own hands : and therefore do you make the best of things about you, not only for the sake of husband and children, but of your friends here, who live in the
236 LETTERS I846-47, [l84«
hope of re-seeing you, among whom count upon myself as ever yours truly,
A. Tennyson.
My dear Mrs Burton,
I am very much grieved that your letter reached me so late. I had left Umberslade and was visiting at two or three places in Warwickshire, and as I had given orders for any letter that came to be for- warded to Cheltenham, I have only just now on arriving received yours. I shall be very happy to be god-father to your little one, and so I am sure will Charles ; he is not here but in town, but he shall be written to to-day, and there is no doubt of his compliance with your kind and flattering proposal : only you must take his consent for granted, as it is impossible for us or you to receive an answer before the time specified: nor for many reasons can either he or I attend in person : I am sorry that all this has so happened. Call your child Alfred if you will : he was bom in the same house, perhaps the same chamber, as myself, and I trust he is destined to a far happier life than mine has been, poor little fellow I Give him a kiss for his god-father, and one to Cathy for her violets which I received and cherished : or if one do not seem enough, give them by the dozen. I am glad that you like the miniature. The papers spoke the truth about Umberslade but they fibbed when they said I was about to publish. What would be the use of that in a general election ? I am writing in a great hurry to save the Northern post, so I bid you good-bye,
A. Tennyson.
ia4e] LETTER TO MARY HOWTTT. 237
2 St jAifES* St., Buckingham Gate.
Wednesday, Jfay 17M.
My dear Mrs Burton,
I have sent a silver cup for my little godson. I had intended to have sent it many a long month ago, but somehow or other I let the days slip on without doing so; for this I beg his pardon, which he must grant me as soon as he can babble. I trust that you will receive the cup at the same time with this letter. I hope that you are well and happy during this fine weather which makes me wish myself far away out of smoky London. Best love to my dear little violet-girl, and believe me always, dear Mrs Burton,
Yours truly, A. Tennyson.
Letters to Mrs Howitt.
[1846.] My dear Mrs Hownr,
The day you mention was at least as pleasant to myself as to you; one, indeed, not easily to be for- gotten. Clapton is henceforth to be remembered with higher and other than cockney associations, it is no longer the London suburb but the home of Mary Howitt. As for the morning dresses, did I notice them ? if I did, what matter ? they were a compliment to myself.
Your book from Longman has not yet arrived ; but when it does, since (however you may please to de- preciate beforehand) it must have something of you
238 LETTERS 1846-47. [l846
about it, I will give it a hearty welcome and my best attention.
I got your letter yesterday, and I have had so much to do in the interim that I have merely glanced over the extracts. They seem to me to be very clever and full of a noble 19th century-ism (if you will admit such a word), but whether not too fantastic, if considered as an explanation of the Mosaic text, may I think admit of doubt. Meanwhile I hail all such attempts as heralding a grander and more liberal state of opinion, and conse- quently sweeter and nobler modes of living. There was no more sea^ says St John in Revelation. I wonder your friend did not quote that : perhaps he does in some other part of his book. I remember reading that when a child, and not being able to reconcile myself to a future when there should be no more sea.
I am going up to Cambridge to-morrow to be present at the commemoration of the founding of Trinity College 300 years ago. There is to be a great dinner in Hall, and as I have got a special invitation from my old Tutor, now the Master, I am going; the 22nd is the dinner-day. I have just left myself time to get there; think of me to-morrow night as passing within two or three miles of you on the Eastern C. R., perhaps not so far, and again sweeping back a day or two after on my return yet not able to stop, divers duties calling me home with voices of undeniable authority. I ought not to go at all but old recollections drag me. However sometime betwixt the death of Spring and the birth of Summer I do hope to see you once more.
I partly guess your mysterious request. Mr Howitt's surprise at the hyacinths is a very pretty household picture. I wish that we Englanders dealt more in such symbols, that we drest our affections up in a little more poetical costume; real warmth of heart would lose nothing, rather gain by it As it is, our manners are as cold as
1846] FR£ILIGRATH. 239
the walls of our churches. Good-bye, dear Mrs Howitt, say everything kind for me to husband and daughter and trust me
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
10 St James' Square, Cheltenham.
Nov. igfh.
Dear Mrs Howitt,
Your kind letter gave me very sincere pleas- ure, and I shall be most happy to meet Mr Dempster under your roof when I come to town. I did not hear the Hutchinsons^ when they were in England and I regret it. I am sure Abby must have sung divinely for everyone says she did. I can scarce help fancying that the female voice is more suited by nature to the singing of such poems than any man's, but I am wrong, for you tell me that Mr Dempster sings quite as exquisitely as Abby. I should have been in town before now but several little matters have occurred to hinder me. Among other things I sent an invitation to the German poet, Freiligrath : he has translated some of my poems and he sent me his book thro' my publisher : the letter to Moxon was dated from Mrs Leigh's, Clapton Pond ; do you know such a person ? I have got no answer and I am puzzled by his silence. Perhaps he may not be in England, after all, but every time the postman knocks I expect to hear from him and that he is coming. I will send you word of my arrival in town.
A. T.
^ American ladies who were noted singers.
240/ LETTERS 1 846-47. [l847
Letters to Edward Moxo%i.
{After the tour in Switzerland)
1846.
My dear Moxon,
I got your parcel and bluebell this morning and a letter from a man who seems deserving and in difficulties ; he has asked me to lend him four pounds, which I have promised to give him, and referred him to you. So let him have that sum if he calls with my letter: his name is R. C. W.
Ever yours, A. Tennyson *.
Second visit to Dr Gully s watercure.
UmBERSLADE HALLy BIRMINGHAM^ 1 847.
Tuesday afternoon,,
My dear Moxon,
I wish you would make up your mind to come down on Saturday and see me here. You could come down by the express as I did in three hours to Birmingham, and any of the cabs at the station would bring you on : here is a Hall in a pleasant park, and you would be all the better for a Sunday's mouthful of fresh air. We can give you a bed here and you should do just as you like. I want to talk with you. I find it very
^ Whenever any literary man ^ deserving and in difficulties ^ applied to him for money, he always endeavoured to help him. To the day of his death he continued this practice.
1847] LETTER TO EDWARD MOXON. 24I
difficult to correct proofs under the treatment \ but you
shall have them all back with you on Monday; don*t
show them to people. I have not at all settled whether
I shall publish them now or in the Autumn, yet an
Edinburgh paper mentions that I have a poem in the
press. Confound the publicities and gabblements of the
19th century! Now, I hope you will come. If you do,
bring two copies of my poems with you, two persons in
this house want them; if you don't come (but I hope
you will) send two. The printers are awful zanies, they
print erasures and corrections too, and other sins they
commit of the utmost inhumanity. Come I Send a line
first
Yours ever,
A. Tennyson.
To Rev. H. Rawnsley.
Park House, Maidstone. April i6ihf 1847.
My dear Rawnsley,
*
Many thanks for your very kind letter, which was grateful to me as showing that I am not forgotten
1 From Umberslade my father writes to Mrs Russell : " They tell me not to read, not to think ; but they might as well tell me not to live. I lack something of the woman^s long-enduring patience in these matters. It b a terribly long process, but then what price is too high for health, and health of mind is so involved with health of body... I wish you could find time in the course of the summer to come over and see us. We should be so happy to see you. We expect my mother from Scotland in a few days^ time. She comes as far as Birmingham with Cecilia and the Professor (Lushington). The latter go on to Park House, Lushington^s seat near Maidstone ; and Charles goes to bring my mother here. Of her kindness and true-heartedness I am sure you never had any doubt, and therefore I need not say anything of the joyful welcome she would give you. She has been much grieved just now with the loss of her cousin, Mr Wheeldon of Market Street near St Albans. A purer Christian, a better man, never lived. He was like her, for he had not a touch of gall in his whole nature. Peace be with him."
T. I. 16
242 LETTERS 1846-47. [l847
amongst you ; not that I wanted any proof of that, but still it is pleasant to have assurance doubly sure. You would have been answered before had I not been away from home, lying sick of more than one ailment at a friend's chamber in the Temple, from whence the other day I came on here partly for change of air and partly because I had promised to pay a farewell visit to my brother-in-law's brother, Harry Lushington. He is going out to Malta as secretary to the Maltese government, a post of (I believe) about ;^I500 a year and one which he is quite clever enough to occupy with credit to himself ; but being a man of feeble stamina he is afraid of the climate and altogether down in the mouth about it, so I came to see the last of him before he went, and do my best to set him up. I am much grieved to hear of your rheumatism. I fear this bitter April is very unfavour- able and the east wind which comes sweeping from the sea over your marshes to Halton. H. L. goes some time next week, and till then I must be here, so that I fear that what with this and my illness a journey into Lincolnshire so as to catch all your "clan" in full con- clave is quite impossible. Well, I can't help it, I love my old friends as much as ever ; recent friendships may be broken thro' but old ones early-made are a part of one's blood and bones. I say my old friendships are as dear as ever, but that you must accept this protestation in lieu of my personal presence and not be hard of faith but believing.
Give my kindest love to each and all of the "old familiar faces," and
Believe me always yours truly,
A. Tennyson.
18i7] LETTER TO MRS RUSSELL. 243
To Mrs Russell.
xo St James* Square^ Cheltenham. Saturday evening. [ Undated^
My DEAREST Aunt,
I have received your welcome note and cheque and had hoped to have a better account of your eyes. Those " animals ^ " you mention are very dis- tressing and mine increase weekly : in fact I almost look forward with certainty to being blind some of these days. I have however no sort of inflammation to complain of, it is all failing nerve. I have no great opinion of the salubrity of Leamington, and as for this place it is often as muggy and turbid as London itself. " Much company " and after-dinner "talk of roads," etc. are not much in your favour, but why do all English country gentlemen talk of dogs, horses, roads, crops etc. ? It is better after all than affecting Art and Feeling : they would make a poor hand of that, though you tried to help them out. I wish they would be a little kinder to the poor.. I would honour them then and they might talk what they would. But I am rambling and moreover getting- perr sonal on the squires, which perhaps I have no business to do, for, as Hamlet says, " use every man after his deserts and who shall scape whipping ? " With respect to the non-publication of those poems ' which you mention, it is partly occasioned by the considerations you speak of, and partly by my sense of their present imperfectness ; perhaps they will not see the light till I have ceased to be. I cannot tell but I have no wish to send them out yet Emily wished us to remember her kindly to you
^ Afusca volitantes*
* Probably " In Memoriam.^
244 LETTERS 1 846-47. [l847
when she was here. She has been visiting the Lushing- tons in Kent, and is now with the Hallams at Clifton. I wonder whether you can read this scrawl, my pen is an old steel one in a state of hopeless splittage and divari- cation. You must forgive me for not answering you before \ I have no excuse to oflFer and I fling myself on your mercy. Do you know, I don't write even a note once in three months. I never can get myself set down to write, and I am in arrears of correspondence with all the world. Goodbye, dearest Aunt. Mother, sisters etc. send lots of love to you and Emma.
Always affectionately yours,
A. Tennyson.
P.S. Have you read Miss Martineau on Mesmerism in the Athenaum (two of them) ? I have got them and if you like I will send them to you. They are very wonderful.
In 1846 the fourth edition of the Poems was pub- lished: and, having been bitterly attacked by Lytton Bulwer because Peel had placed him on the Pension list, my father contributed to Punch the only personal satire he ever wrote, " The New Timon and the Poets," February 28th ; followed by an "After-thought *," March 7th. About these poems he left a note :
" I never wrote a line against anyone but Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer. His lines did not move me to do so. But at the very time he was writing or had written these he was visiting my cousins, the d'Eyncourts, and said to them, * How much I should like to know your cousin
' He said he could not devote himself to his work and write letters also, so he gave np writing to friends and relations.
* Published afterwards under the title of ^ Literary Squabbles.*
1847] "odium LITERARIUM." 245
Alfred ' ; and I, going into a book-club in the town where I was then living, found a newspaper turned up and folded so that I could not miss, * See how Sir Edward tickles up the poetasters and their patrons.' The stupid insignificant paper, and the purpose with which it had been set before me, provoked me. I saw afterwards a letter which he wrote to my friend John Forster. Moreover, he stated in a note that I belonged to a very rich family. The younger son, his friend, who had inherited was rich enough, but the elder branch was shut out in the cold, and at that time I had scarce anything. Moreover, I remembered that he had said * If a man be attacked, let him attack.'
Wretched work. Odium literarium."
My father added : " I never sent my lines to Punch. John Forster did. They were too bitter. I do not think that I should ever have published them."
^i^ A^£^ WiHi Ut ut, tfyc 4U,vr Hm. *«y«
y, Ay^ UA4 UU. 1^4^ ^^ ^*^ .
Jttaa, a tMKi.«w4i.V6 A^ A^C*- *u/iC
Fnm li* Mpmtl MS.
346
CHAPTER XII.
"THE PRINCESS."
Maybe wildest dreams Are but the needful preludes of the truth.
O lift your natures up: Embrace our aims: work out your freedom!
There are thousands now Such women, but convention beats them down; It is but bringing up; no more than that
"I say God made the woman for the man, And for the good and increase of the world." "Parson," said I, "you pitch the pipe too low.**
What someone called the "herald-melody" of the higher education of women, "The Princess," mostly written in Lincoln's Inn Fields, was published in 1847, and at this time " The Golden Year " was added to the Poems. The subject of "The Princess," my father believed, was original, and certainly the story is full of original incident, humour and fancy \
It may have suggested itself when the project of
^ Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the great mathematician, said : ^ It deeply presses on my reflection how much wiser a book is Tennyson*s Princess than my Quaternions^
248 "THE PRINCESS." [l847
a Women's College was in the air\ or it may have arisen in its mock-heroic form from a Cambridge joke, such as he commemorated in these lines, which I found in one of his old MS books :
The Doctors Daughter. {Unpublished)
Sweet Kitty Sandilands,
The daughter of the doctor. We drest her in the Proctor's bands,
And past her for the Proctor.
All the men ran from her
That would have hasten'd to her.
All the men ran from her
That would have come to woo her.
Up the street we took her
As far as to the Castle, Jauntily sat the Proctor's cap
And from it hung the tassel.
As for the various characters in the poem, they give all possible views of Woman's higher education ; and as for the heroine herself, the Princess Ida, the poet who created her considered her as one of the noblest among his women. The stronger the man or woman, the more of the lion or lioness untamed, the greater the man or woman tamed. In the end we see this lioness-like woman subduing the elements of her humanity to that which is highest within her, and recognizing the relation in which she stands towards the order of the world and toward God —
A greater than all knowledge beat her down.
1 He talked over the plan of the poem with my mother in 1839.
1847] TWO GREAT SQCIAL QUESTIONS. 249
His friends report my father to have said, that the two g^at social questions impending in England were " the housing and education of the poor man before making him our master, and the higher education of women " ; and that the sooner woman finds out, before the great educational movement begins, that "woman is not un- developt man, but diverse," the better it will be for the progress of the world \
There have not been wanting those who have deemed the varied characters and imagery of the poem wasted on something of a fairy tale without the fairies \ But, in this instance as in others involving the supreme meaning and guidance of life, a parable is perhaps the teacher^ that can most surely enter in at all doors.
It was no mere dramatic sentiment, but one of my father's strongest convictions of the true relation between man and woman, which impelled him to write:
Let this proud watchword rest Of equal; seeing either sex alone Is half itself, and in true marriage lies Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils Defect in each, and always thought in thought, Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow. The single pure and perfect animal. The two-ceird heart beating, with one full stroke. Life.
^ Dawson, the Canadian editor of " The Princess," writes : " At the time of the publication of 'The Princess' the surface-thought of England was intent solely upon Irish famines, corn-laws and free-trade. It was only after many years that it became conscious of anything being wrong in the position of women... No doubt such ideas were at the time ' in the air' in England, but the dominant, practical^ Philistinism scoffed at them as < ideas ' banished to America, that refuge for exploded European absurdities."
[I believe the Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary (Wollstone- craft) Godwin (1792) first turned the attention of the people of England to the " wrongs of women."]
' The foUowing paragraphs are based on what my faXhtr said about the poem.
250 "the princess." [i847
And if woman in her appointed place " stays all the fair young planet in her hands/' she may be well content. She has space enough to
Burgeon out of all Within her — let her make herself her own To give or keep, to live and learn and be All that not harms distinctive womanhood.
She must train herself to do the large work that lies before her, even though she may not be destined to be wife or mother, cultivating her understanding not her memory only, her imagination in its highest phases, her inborn spirituality and her sympathy with all that is Ipure, noble and beautiful, rather than mere social ac- jcomplishments ; then and then only will she further the progress of humanity, then and then only men will continue to hold her in reverence.
On the other hand one of the poet's main tests of manhood is " the chivalrous reverence " for womanhood.
To love one maiden only, cleave to her. And worship her by years of noble deeds, Until they win her; for indeed I know Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid. Not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thought and amiable words. And courtliness and the desire of fame. And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
He would say, "I would pluck my hand from a man even if he were my greatest hero, or dearest friend, if he wronged a woman or told her a lie."
After 1847 "The Princess " underwent considerable alterations. The second edition was published in 1848 with a few amendments, and dedicated to Henry
1847] THE BLANK VERSE OF "THE PRINCESS.** 25 1
Lushington, but in 1850 a third edition appeared with omissions and many additions, and notably six songs were introduced, which help to express more clearly the meaning of " the medley." These songs
The women sang Between the rougher voices of the men, Like linnets in the pauses of the wind.
In 185 1 the "weird seizures" of the Prince were inserted. His too emotional temperament was intended from an artistic point of view to emphasize his com- parative want of power. " Moreover," my father writes, •* the words * dream-shadow,' * were and were not ' doubt- less refer to the anachronisms and improbabilities of the story: compare the prologue.
Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream,
and V. 466,
And like a flash the weird affection came,
I seem'd to move in old memorial tilts, And doing battle with forgotten ghosts. To dream myself the shadow of a dream."
" It may be remarked that there is scarcely anything in the story which is not prophetically glanced at in the prologue." My father added : " It is true that some of the blank verse in this poem is among the best I ever wrote " — such passages as :
Not peace she look'd — the Head: but rising up Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so To the open window moved, remaining there Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves
\
252 "THE PRINCESS." [l847
Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light
Dash themselves dead. She stretch'd her arms and
caird Across the tumult and the tumult fell;
and as this description of a storm seen from Snowdon :
As one that climbs a peak to gaze O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night. Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore. And suck the blinding splendour from the sand. And quenching lake by lake, and tarn by tarn. Expunge the world ;
and as these lines from the last canto :
Look up, and let thy nature strike on mine. Like yonder morning on the blind half-world; Approach and fear not; breathe upon my brows; In that fine air I tremble, all the past Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this Is morn to more, and all the rich to-come Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels Athwart the smoke of burning weeds. Forgive me, I waste my heart in signs: let be. My bride. My wife, my life. O we will walk this world. Yoked in all exercise of noble end. And so thro' those dark gates across the wild That no man knows.
For simple rhythm and vowel music he considered his " Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height," written in Switzerland (chiefly at Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald), and descriptive of the waste Alpine heights and gorges, and of the sweet, rich valleys below, as amongst his " most successful work'' But by this phrase
1847] NOTES ON "THE PRINCESS." 253
he meant no more than that he felt he had done his best: there was no tinge of vanity in it. To put his own poetry in favourable comparison with that of others was never in his mind.
He said that " The passion of the past, the abiding in the transient, was expressed in * Tears, idle Tears,' which was written in the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintem Abbey, full for me of its bygone memories. Few know that it is a blank verse lyric." He thought that my uncle Charles' sonnet of " Time and Twilight " had the same sort of mystic, ddmonisch feeling.
The only song in "The Princess" approved by Fitzgerald was " Blow, Bugle, Blow," commemorating the echoes at Killarney ^
" That is one of Fitz's crotchets," Fitzgerald said to me in 1876, "and I am considered a great heretic, because like Carlyle I gave up all hopes of him after • The Princess.' " He wrote once, and repeated for me in his MS notes, that none of the songs had " the old champagne flavour," adding, "Alfred is the same mag- nanimous, kindly delightful fellow as ever, uttering by far the finest prose-sayings of anyone." Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met Fitzgerald's appro- bation unless he had first seen it in manuscript.
The following notes on " The Princess " were left by my father :
In the Prologue the " Tale from mouth to mouth " was a game which I have more than once played when I was at Trinity College, Cambridge, with my brother undergraduates. Of course, if he "that inherited the tale" had not attended very carefully to his prede- cessors, there were contradictions ; and if the story were historical, occasional anachronisms. In defence of what
^ When my fiither was last there a boatman said to him, '' So you^re the gentleman that brought the money to the place ?^*
254 "the princess." [1847
some have called the too poetical passages, it should be recollected that the poet of the party was requested to " dress the tale up poetically," and he was full of the ''gallant and heroic chronicle." Some of my remarks on passages in the " Princess " have been published by Dawson of Canada, who copied them from a letter which I wrote to him criticizing his study of the " Princess ^" The child is the link thro' the parts as shown in the songs which are the best interpreters of the poem \ Before the first edition came out, I deliber- ated with myself whether I should put songs between the separate divisions of the poem; again I thought that the poem would explain itself, but the public did not see the drift. The first song I wrote was named " The Losing of the Child." The child is sitting on the bank of the river and playing with flowers; a flood comes down; a dam has been broken thro' — the child is borne down by the flood; the whole village distracted; after a time the flood has subsided ; the child is thrown safe and sound again upon the bank ; and there is a chorus of jubilant women.
^ The letter is printed on pp. 256-259 of this volume.
* ''At the end of the first canto, fresh from the description of the female college, with its professoresses, and hostleresses, and other Utopian monsters, we turn the page, and —
As through the land at eve we went.
O there above the little grave. We kissed again with tears.
Between the next two cantos intervenes the well-known cradle song, perhaps the best of all ; and at the next interval is the equally well-known bugle- iong, the idea of which is that of twin-labour and twin-fame in a pair of lovers. In the next the memory of wife and child inspirits the soldier on the field ; in the next the sight of the £dlen heroes child opens the sluices of his widow^s tears; and in the last, ...the poet has succeeded, in the new edition, in superadding a new form of emotion to a canto in which he seemed to have exhausted every resource of pathos which his subject allowed.*' Charles Kingsley, in Fraser^s Maganney September, 185a
1847] ANOTHER VERSION OF "SWEET AND LOW.'* 255
( Unpublished fragment^
The child was sitting on the bank
Upon a stormy day, He loved the river's roaring sound; The river rose and burst his bound, Flooded fifty leagues around, Took the child from oflf the ground.
And bore the child away. O the child so meek and wise.
Who made us wise and mild !
Two versions of " Sweet and Low " were made, and were sent to my mother to choose which should be published. She chose the published one in preference to that which follows, because it seemed to her more song-like.
{Unpublished version.)
Bright is the moon on the deep, Bright are the cliflFs in her beam.
Sleep, my little one, sleep! Look he smiles, and opens his hands. He sees his father in distant lands, And kisses him there in a dream. Sleep, sleep.
Father is over the deep, Father will come to thee soon,.
Sleep, my pretty one, sleep! Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the West, Under the silver moon, Sleep, sleep!
256 "THE PRINCESS." [l847
" The notices of " The Princess " that I know inter- ested my father were those by Aubrey de Vere \ Charles Kingsley, Robertson (the Brighton preacher), and Daw- son of Montreal. To the last* he wrote a letter (Nov. 2ist, 1882) which may be quoted in full:
I thank you for your able and thoughtful essay on " The Princess." You have seen amongst other things that if women ever were to play such freaks, the bur- lesque and the tragic might go hand in hand. * ♦ * Your explanatory notes are very much to the purpose, and I do not object to your finding parallelisms. They must always occur. A man (a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me saying that in an unknown, un- translated Chinese poem there were two whole lines ' of mine almost word for word ? Why not? Are not human eyes all over the world looking at the same objects, and must there not consequently be coincidences of thought and impressions and expressions ? It is scarcely possible for anyone to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which, in the rest of the literature of the world, a parallel could not somevhere be found. But when you say that this passage or that was suggested by
1 Edinburgh Review^ No. CLXXxn. October, 1849.
* In Dawson^s Study of tht Princess I find that I have written, after a talk with my father it propos possibly of the battle at the end of the poem : — ^ A. T. observed: ' Maq>herson*s 'Ossian' is poor in most parts, but this is a grand image — After saying that the beam of battle was bright before the spectral warrior, he goes on somehow like this : ' But behind thee was the Shadow of Death, like the darkened half of the moon behind its other half in growing light" A. T. talked of 'the beautiful picture that the girl graduates would have made ; the long hall glittering like a bed of flowers with daffodil and lilac.^ Then he touched on the old religions and the ' old god of war'; *the Norse mythology,' he said, *is finer than the Greek with its human gods, though the Greek has more beauty. The Norsemen thought that there was something better in the way of religion that would dawn upon the earth after the Ragnarok or twilight of the gods.' "
•The Peak is high, and the stars are high, And the thought of a man is higher.
"The Voice and the Peak."
1847] SUGGESTIONS FOR POEMS. 257
Wordsworth or Shelley or another, I demur ; and more, I wholly disagree. There was a period in my life when, as an artist, Turner for instance, takes rough sketches of landskip, etc. in order to work them eventually into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in Nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain : e.g.
A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight.
Suggestion.
The sea one night at Torquay, when Torquay was the most lovely sea-village in England, tho' now a smoky town. The sky was covered with thin vapour, and the moon behind it.
A great black cloud Drags inward from the deep.
Suggestion. A coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon.
In the " Idylls of the King,"
With all Its stormy crests that smote against the skies.
Suggestion.
A storm which came upon us in the middle of the North Sea.
As the water-lily starts and slides.
Suggestion.
Water-lilies in my own pond, seen on a gusty day with my own eyes. They did start and slide in the sudden puflfs of wind till caught and stayed by the tether
T. I. 17
258 "THE PRINCESS.** [l847
of their own stalks, quite as true as Wordsworth's simile and more in detail.
A wild wind shook, — Follow, follow, thou shalt win.
Suggestion.
I was walking in the New Forest. A wind did arise and
Shake the songs, the whispers and the shrieks Of the wild wood together.
The wind I believe was a west wind, but because I wished the Prince to go south, I turned the wind to the south, and naturally the wind said " follow." I believe the resemblance which you note is just a chance one. Shelley's lines are not familiar to me tho' of course, if they occur in the Prometheus^ I must have read them. I could multiply instances, but I will not bore you, and far indeed am I from asserting that books as well as Nature are not, and ought not to be, suggestive to the poet. I am sure that I myself, and many others, find a peculiar charm in those passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton where they adopt the creation of a bygone poet, and re-clothe it, more or less, according to their own fancy. But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up among us, editors of booklets, book-worms, index-hunters, or men of great memories and no imagi- nation, who impute themselves to the poet, and so believe that he^ too, has no imagination, but is for ever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate. They will not allow one to say * Ring the bell ' without finding that we have taken it from Sir P. Sidney, or even to use such a simple expression as the ocean " roars," without finding out the precise verse in Homer or Horace from which we have plagiarised it (fact 1).
1847] GAVARNIE. 259
I have known an old fish-wife, who had lost two sons at sea, clench her fist at the advancing tide on a stormy day, and cry out, "Ay I roar, do I how I hates to see thee show thy white teeth." Now if I had adopted her ex- clamation and put it into the mouth of some old woman in one of my poems, I daresay the critics would have thought it original enough, but would most likely have advised me to go to Nature for my old women and not to my own imagination ^ ; and indeed it is a strong figure.
Here is another anecdote about suggestion. When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these mountains before a waterfall^ that comes down one thousand or twelve hundred feet I sketched it (according to my custom then) in these words:
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn.
When I printed this, a critic informed me that "lawn" was the material used in theatres to imitate a waterfall, and graciously added, " Mr T. should not go to the boards of a theatre but to Nature herself for his sug- gestions." And I had gone to Nature herself.
I think it is a moot point whether, if I had known how that efifect was produced on the stage, I should have ventured to publish the line.
I find that I have written, quite contrary to my custom, a letter, when I had merely intended to thank you for your interesting commentary.
Thanking you again for it, I beg you to believe me
Very faithfully yours,
A. Tennyson.
^ He used to compare with this the Norfolk saying which we heard when we were stajdng with the Rev. C. T. Digby at Warham: ''The sea is moaning for the loss of the wind.^
^ In the Cirque de Gavarnie.
17— a
Jl60 "THE PRINCESS," [l847
Letters after the publication of " The Princess^
To Edward Fitzgerald.
1847. My dear Frrz,
Ain't I a beast for not answering you before ? not that I am going to write now, only to tell you that I have seen Carlyle more than once, and that I have been sojourning at 42 Ebury Street for some twenty days or so, and that I am going to bolt as soon as ever I can, and that I would go to Italy if I could get anybody to go with me which I can't, and so I suppose I shan't go, which makes me hate myself and all the world ; for the rest I have been be-dined usque ad nauseam. A pint of pale ale and a chop are things yearned after, not achiev- able except by way of lunch. However, this night I have sent an excuse to Mrs Procter and here I am alone, and wish you were with me. How are you getting on ? Don't grow quite into glebe before I see you again.
My book is out and I hate it, and so no doubt will you.
Never mind, you will like me none the worse, and now good-night. I am knocked up and going to bed.
Ever yours, A. Tennyson.
To Aubrey de Vere.
1847- My dear Aubrey,
I have ordered Moxon to send you the new edition ^ of " The Princess." You will find that I have in some measure adopted your suggestions, not entirely.
1 Not published tiU 1848.
1847] LETTERS TO DE VERE AND MRS HOWITT. 26 1
Many thanks for your critique in the Edinburgh. There were only one or two little things in it which I did not like ; for instance that about the " dying and the dead " which is quite wide of the mark \ and you will see that I have inserted a line to guard against such an interpre- tation in future; however I have every reason to be grateful to you, both for the ability of the article and for the favourable view you take of me in general ; top favourable surely. I dare not believe such good things of myself, I have seen no papers for an age, and do not know how your poor are going on. I fear this bitter weather is very hard upon them.
A. T.
To Mrs Howitt.
42 Ebury Street. My dear Mrs Howitt,
I got your beautiful book of Ballads the other day at Moxon's. It contains (as far as I have seen it) much that is sweet and good and reminds me of yourself. I have however been myself so much engaged with proof-sheets for the few days since I. received it that I have not had leisure to do it justice by a fair perusal. Accept in return a book * of mine which I have sent to Longmans' for you. I don't believe you will like it — not at least till after three readings, if you will honour it so far. Best remembrances to husband and daughter, not forgetting the younglings and
Believe me always yours,
A. Tennyson.
1 See p. 282.
« " The Princess."
262 "THE PRINCESS.** [l847
For the sisters Bronte my father had the highest admiration. He received the following letter from Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte):
June 1 6th, 1847. SlR»
My relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell, and myself, heed- less of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.
The consequences predicted have of course overtaken us ; our book is found to be a drug ; no man needs it nor heeds.
In the space of a year the publisher has disposed but of two copies ; and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of these two, himself only knows.
Before transferring the edition to the trunkmakers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell. We beg to offer you one in acknowledgement of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works.
I am, Sir, yours very respectfully,
Currer Bell.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHELTENHAM, LONDON, CORNWALL, SCOTLAND
AND IRELAND, 1846-1850.
The headquarters of the Tennysons were now at Cheltenham, Bellevue House in St James' Square. I am indebted to Dr Ker, brother of Judge Alan Ker, who married Miss Mary Tennyson, for some details of my father's life at this time.
From 1846 to 1850 he was often with his mother and family, but cannot be said to have moved in the society of the place: still he made some new acquaintances. The names I can recall are those of Dobson \ afterwards Principal of Cheltenham College ; Boyd, afterwards Dean of Exeter; Foxton, author of Popular Christianity; Sydney Dobell, the poet ; Dr Acworth ; Rashdall, Vicar of Malvern ; Reece ; and the well-known and " much beloved " Frederick Robertson, then Boyd's curate, afterwards incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton.
There was a little room at the top of the house in St James' Square, not kept in very orderly fashion, for books and papers were to be seen quite as much on the floor and the chairs as upon the table. Here my father, pipe in mouth, discoursed to his friends more uncon- strainedly than anywhere else on men and things and what death means. When the talk was on religious
' Dobson was third classic in the same year that Edmund Lushington was senior classic and Thompson fourth.
263
264 1 846- 1 850. [l846-
questions, which was not often, he spoke confidently of a future existence. Of Christianity he said, " it is rugging at my heart \"
My father would say: "The first time I met Robertson I felt that he expected something notable from me because I knew that he admired my poems, that he wished to pluck the heart from my mystery ; so for the life of me from pure nervousness I could talk of nothing but beer."
Dr Ker says :
Sydney Dobell did not see much of your father in Chel- tenham; but in Malvern, some years after your family left this place, Dobell, as he afterwards told me, saw a good deal of him. Dobell, as you know, was not a popular poet, and the number of his readers does not increase as the years go on, but that he was no commonplace poet your father heartily allowed. Frederick Foxton could only be brought to speak on one subject, Carlyle, whose companion and caretaker he had been during a journey on the Continent Rashdall and Dr Acworth were men of cultivation and high social qualities whom your father met occasionally and much liked.
One acquaintance would keep on assuring my father that it was the greatest honour of his life to have met him. My father's answer to such praise was, " Don't talk d — d nonsense."
His chief companion, when in Cheltenham, for the best part of two years, was Dr Ker's brother Alan. Both were great walkers, and few near or distant places in this beautiful neighbourhood were left unvisited by them.
A year or two before, my father had lived some weeks in a Hydropathic Establishment at the very primitive village of Prestbury, and the village boys were in the habit of following him and the other inmates whenever they showed themselves on the roads and shouting,
1 Dr Ker, MS Notes.
1847] WORDSWORTH AND "DORA." 265
" Shiver and shake." This made him very nervous at the time, and the thought even of passing through Prestbury revived the feeling. Dr Ker writes :
Two wishes I used to hear him express ; one was to see the West Indies, the other to see the earth from a balloon.
Few things delighted me more than to see the mother and son together. You cannot remember your grandmother, I think. She was a perfect picture, a beautiful specimen of the English gentlewoman, loving and loveable, "no angel but a dearer being," and so sensitive that touch her feelings ever so lightly and the tears rushed to her eyes. Then it was we used to hear your father say, " Dam your eyes, mother, dam your eyes ! " and then she smiled ahd applied the white pocket-handkerchief and shook her head at her son. He often jested with her about Dr Gumming and his " bottles," the bottles being the seven vials of St John's Revelation ! You have heard, I dare say, that your grandmother confined her reading at that time to two books, the Bible and Dr Cumming's work on Prophecy, He used to jest with his mother about her monkey, a clever little black thing that was generally seen in the garden perched on the top of a pole. Your father naturally christened it St Simeon Stylites. I once ventured to ask him whether his mother had not sat for the picture of the Prince's mother in " The Princess," and he allowed that no one else had.
Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall He shall not blind his soul with clay.
Your father's estimate of Wordsworth's poetry was a very high one as you must know, and I dare say you know that Wordsworth's opinion of your father was also very high. On one of the occasions of their meeting Wordsworth said to him : " Mr Tennyson, I have been endeavouring all my life to write a pastoral like your * Dora ' and have not succeeded." That was g^eat praise from one who honestly weighed his words and was by no means lavish of his praise.
266 1 846-1 850. [l84(V-
From Cheltenham my father made expeditions to London to see his old friends. One day Savile Morton writes that he has called on Alfred, and found Thackeray there, and "a stack of shag tobacco with Homer and Miss Barrett on the table." " Both Thackeray and Alfred," he adds, " praise Miss Barrett." My father grew to know Thackeray well and would call him a " loveable man." A story which he told illustrates the character of both the friends. They had been dining together and my father said, " I love Catullus for his perfection in form and for his tenderness, he is tenderest of Roman poets," and quoted the lines about Quintilia's death ending with
"Quo desiderio veteres renovamus amores Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias " —
lines which he would translate by four lines from one of Shakespeare's Sonnets,
"Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh Love's long since canceird woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight,"
and the stanza from the " Juliae et Mallii Epithalamium,"
"Torquatus, volo, parvulus Matris e gremio suae Porrigens teneras manus Dulce rideat ad patrem, Semihiante labello."
Thackeray answered, " I do not rate him highly, I could do better myself." Next morning my father received this apology:
My dear Alfred,
I woke at 2 o'clock, and in a sort of terror at a certain speech I had made about Catullus. When I have dined, sometimes I believe myself to be equal to the greatest painters and poets. That delusion goes off ; and then I know what a
1847] WALKS WITH CARLYLE. 267
small fiddle mine is and what small tunes I play upon it It
was very generous of you to give me an opportunity of recalling a
silly speech : but at the time I thought I was making a perfectly
simple and satisfactory observation. Thus far I must unbus'm
myself : though why should I be so uneasy at having made a
conceited speech ? It is conceited not to wish to seem conceited.
With which I conclude,
Yours, W. M. T.
" It was impossible," said my father, " to have written in a more generous spirit. No one but a noble-hearted man could have written such a letter."
During the " forties " he was in the habit of walking with Carlyle at night, and Carlyle would rail against the "governments of Jackasserie which cared more for commerce than for the greatness of our empire"; or would rave against the stuccoed houses in London as " acrid putrescence," or against the suburbs as a " black jumble of black cottages where there used to be pleasant fields " ; and they would both agree that it was growing into " a strange chaos of odds and ends, this London." They were not in the least afraid of one another although many were afraid of them, and they had long and free discussions on every conceivable subject, and once only almost quarrelled, when Carlyle asserted that my father talked of poetry as " high art," which he flatly contra- dicted, ** I never in my whole life spoke of * high art'"
They had — both of them — lost MSS of their works; Carlyle his French Revolution, my father Poems, chiefly Lyrical. When my father asked Carlyle how he felt after the disappearance of his MS, he answered, "Well, I just felt like a man swimming without water."
My uncle Frederick writes :
I am sure I could not perform such a feat as I know Alfred to have done, any more than raise the dead. The earliest MS of the Poems, chiefly Lyrical he lost out of his great-coat pocket one night while returning from a neighbouring market town.
268 1846-185O. [l846-
This was enough to reduce an ordinary man to despair, but the invisible ink was made to reappear, all the thoughts and fancies in their orderly series and with their entire drapery of words arose and lived again. I wonder what under such circumstances would become of the "mob of gentlemen who write with ease." Of course it would not much matter as they could easily indite something new.
My father's poems were generally based on some single phrase like "Someone had blundered": and were rolled about, so to speak, in his head, before he wrote them down : and hence they did not easily slip from his memory.
In these London days among his friends were the Kembles, Coventry Patmore, Frederick Pollock, Alfred Wigan, and Macready ; and he enjoyed " turning in " at the theatres, Macready he thought not good in " Hamlet " but fine in " Macbeth " : yet said that his " Out, out, brief candle ! " was wrong, " not vexed and harassed as it ought to be, but spoken with lowered voice, and a pathos which I am sure, Shakespeare never intended."
One evening, at Bath House, Milnes wished to intro- duce my father to the Duke of Wellington. " No," my father said, " why should the great Duke be bothered by a poor poet like me?" He only once saw the Duke, when he was riding out of the Horse Guards at White- hall : and took oflF his hat. The Duke instantly made his usual military salute, commemorated in the " Ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington " in the well-known lines :
No more in soldier fashion will he greet With lifted hand the gazer in the street
Rogers continued to be intimate with my father, and would ask him privately his opinion on literary matters ^
^ My fitther asked him why he did not write a sonnet. ** I never could dance in fetters,^* he answered. My father himself preferred the Shake- spearian form of sonnet to the Italian, as being less constrained.
1847] LONDON FRIENDS. 269
At one of the famous breakfasts, wishing to do my father honour before the company, and expecting praise, Rogers enquired whether he approved of a particular poem by himself. My father told him frankly that a certain emendation would be an improvement " It shall be attended to," answered Rogers, but very stiffly. Then, because my father went to the Water-Cure, Rogers had an erroneous idea that he "suflFered from many in- firmities." When I showed my father this statement in a published letter, he wrote down : " No truer comment could be made on this than my favourite adage, * Every man imputes himself.' My good old friend had many in- firmities. What mine were I know not unless short-sight and occasional hypochondria be infirmities. I used, from having early read in my father's library a great number of medical books, to fancy at times that I had all the diseases in the world, like a medical student. I dare say old Rogers meant it all for the best. Peace be with him! often bitter, but very kindly at heart. We have often talked of death together till I have seen the tears roll down his cheeks."
About this time there was a dinner given at Hampstead by a Society of Authors, Sergeant Talfourd in the chair. My father accepted an invitation to the dinner on condition that he should not be asked to make a speech. Many speeches were made, each author praising every other author. My father seems to have said to his neighbour, " I wonder which of us will last 500 years ? " Upon which Talfourd jumped up and burst forth into "A speech about Tennyson," affirming that he was " sure to live." Then Douglas Jerrold seized my father's hand and said, " I haven't the smallest doubt that you will outlast us all, and that you are the one who will live." The subject of these enthusiastic words dis- claimed his sureness of lasting, and told his friends that while thanking them all he felt his inability to make
2 70 1 846- 1850. [l847
a speech and so on. Talfourd shouted out, " Why you are
making a speech." " Yes," answered my father, " but not upon my legs."
Letters^ 1847.
To Mrs Howitt
[Dr Gully's.]
May 22nd^ [1847?].
My dear Mrs Howitt,
I got your letter three or four days ago and if I did not answer immediately you must lay it to the account of the water-cure which I am undergoing and which renders letter- writing or anything, except washing and walking, more difficult than those who have not past thro' the same ordeal would easily believe.
At this moment my own family do not know where I am : I have not written home, nor shall write I dare say for some time ; to be sure I am not at any time much in the habit of writing home, and so my people know my ways and forgive them; but to you I feared to seem unkind and forgetful of the pleasant day I spent under your roof if I kept silence ; so I write to tell you that my visit to Clapton though necessarily postponed will really if I live and thrive sometime take place; "sunshine" and " flowers " will go on for a long time yet, and before they are all gone I hope to see you and to find you wholly recovered from the eflFects of that sad and anxious winter you speak of; to me it is not permitted to be either sad or anxious if I am to get better. I must, like Prince Hal, " doff the world aside and let it pass," so says my doctor tho' he does not quote Shakespeare for it
1847] FREIUGRATH. 27I
Good-bye and give my best remembrances to all yours whom I know, and
Believe me, my dear Mrs Howitt,
Yours very truly, A. Tennyson.
To F. Freiligrath.
10 St James' Square, Cheltenham.
Nov. sM, [1847?].
My dear Sir,
I had long ago heard of you : I knew that you were a celebrated German Poet and lover of Liberty: therefore was my satisfaction great to receive (as I did this morning) a copy of your works with your own friendly autograph, I need not say how much I feel the honour you have done me in translating some of my poems into your own noble and powerful language. Would that my acquaintance were more perfect with Germans then would my tribute of approbation be of more value and less incur the charge of presumption. I have not yet had time and leisure sufficient to read your translations from myself carefully ; but from what I have seen and if I may be permitted to judge, I should say that they are not dry bones, but seem full of a living warmth, in fact a Poet's translation of Poetry. I could wish however that you had taken the 2nd edition of " Mariana in the South " : the old poem was so imperfect as to be wholly unworthy your notice.
Accept my friendship and my regrets that I am not at present able to come up to town and shake you by the hand. How long do you stop in England? Is there any hope that you could be prevailed upon to come to
^ He could read German with ease at this time.
272 I846-185O. [l848
Cheltenham? I should be most happy to see you. Write to me and tell me, and
Believe me, my dear Sir, ever yours,
A. Tennyson.
1848-49.
In February the Tennysons received a letter from Emily in Paris. The Revolution against Louis Philippe had begun. She had been looking out of her window, and was shot at by one of the Revolutionists, the bullet missing her and going through the ceiling. The account continues, written but not signed by her :
31, Rue Tronchet.
Feb. 2Sih, 1848.
It would be impossible to attempt any description of the horrors of yesterday. However, the public events are better recorded, and will have reached you by means of the paper. But I will at once satisfy your anxiety as to the safety of myself and all our friends. Instead of retiring to the Convent as I had intended on Wednesday, I could not make up my mind to leave my friends at a moment of such imminent danger, and the only moment past m which I could have crossed the Bridges. I have remained the last two nights with Madame Marthion, sleeping in her room, unable to procure any clothes but those I brought on my back from the Convent on Tuesday. Yesterday past like a fearful dream. In the morning it was hoped the resig- nation of Guizot would satisfy the people, but their triumph only made them the more exorbitant, and while the Gen- eral who had gone to his post at the Tuileries was break- fasting at II o'clock, the Deputation came to the King, and everything was immediately in disorder. The King, after recommending to the National Guard the safety of the citizens, started for St Cloud in a carriage, with all his family, except the Duchess of Orleans and her children. The General was ap- prised of Sophie's arrival at the Tuileries, and went downstairs to see her, and on returning to his post by the Duchess of
1848] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848, 273
Orleans as quickly as he could, was met by her. " Mon cher G^n^ral, suivez-moi " was all she was able to say to him in passing. The poor man was unable to obey, and his feelings can be better understood than described, as he saw her crossing the Tuileries Gardens on foot, escorted by a few friends amidst this infuriated mob to the Chamber of Deputies. There she was at first well received, but some of the mob penetrated and sur- rounded her, and one man applied a gun to her cheek. This however was happily turned off by a Deputy, and Jules Lasteyre, another of the Opposition Deputies, aided by many of his brother Deputies, defended her and contrived to get her into a fiacre which he drove to the Invalides. She was separated from her children for some time, but at length they joined her in disguise, and she is at this moment not at the Invalides, but in a secret place of safety, of which the General himself is ignorant. After the departure of the King, the Tuileries was thoroughly invaded by the mob, and every article of furniture completely destroyed. The poor General stayed to defend the property of the Duchess as long as he thought he could be of use, and then he with Sophie left the Tuileries, he, almost lifted down- stairs by a man whom he had had an opportunity of serving, and his infirmities were respected by the mob, till he got to the Rue du 29 Juillet, towards 2 o'clock ; from thence, as soon as he could be removed, to the Rue des Capucines where he is now. Of course his place and position are gone, but you may conceive the anxiety of our minds to know what had become of him and Sophie during the fearful hours they were in the Tuileries, where it was impossible to attempt* any communication. • • ♦- You. never saw such a set of ruffians as infest the streets, armed with- every weapon with which they could furnish themselves, shouting and singing the ** Marseillaise,'' etc. About half an hour ago a gang went by shouting "Au chemin de fer " ; and we fear that the passage out of Paris will be completely cut off. The streets are all barricaded so that no carriage can pass, and though Madame Marthion and Sophie consider the wisest plan would be to leave the town we fear it will scarcely now be possible. • • • The Palais Royal is burnt down. • • • We were obliged to illuminate for safety's sake last night, and such a host of villains have taken advantage of this tumult, that you may imagine our rest was scarcely so to be called. The fear of pillage, and the anxiety lest this infuriated mob might even turn
T. I. v%
2 74 1 846- 1 85a [l848
against our only security, the National Guard, at a moment of no existing government (for the provisional government could not yesterday come to any measures), kept our minds awake, while our eyes were closed, though fatigue of mind and body overcame our anxiety in a g^reat measure. The situation of the General's house, next to Guizofs, also keeps us in constant alarm. The noise of firing also all night, in the uncertainty of its being merely rejoicing, or with murderous objects, contributed its share to add to our anxiety. ♦ ♦ •
Provisions are growing very scarce, and the cry for hreaui is now strong. Yesterday half the mob were drunk.
My father s journal of his Tour in Cornwall^ i848(fcf^rif he thought of again taking up the subject of Arthur^,
Tuesday^ May 30M. Arrived at Bade in dark, askt girl way to sea, she opens the back door... I go out and in a moment go sheer down, upward of six feet, over wall on fanged cobbles ^ Up again and walked to sea over dark hill.
fune 2nd. Took a gig to Rev. S. Hawker at Mor- wenstow, passing Comb valley, fine view over sea, coldest manner of Vicar till I told my name, then all heartiness. Walk on cliflf with him, told of shipwreck.
Sunday. Rainy and bad, went and sat in Tintagel ruins, clifif all black and red and yellow, weird looking thing.
* " At one place," writes Miss Fox, "where he arrived in the evening, he cried, 'Where is the sea? Show me the sea/ So after the sea he went stumbling in the dark, and fell down and hurt his leg so much that he had to be nursed six weeks by a surgeon there, who introduced some friends to him, and thus he got into a class of society totally new to him ; and when he left they gave him a series of introductions, so that instead of going to hotels he was passed on from town to town, and abode with little grocers and shopkeepers along his line of travel. He says that he cannot have better got a true impression of the class, and thinks the Cornish very superior to the generadity. They all knew about Tennyson, and had read his poems, and one miner hid behind a wall that he might see him. Thus he became familiarized with the thoughts and feelings of all classes of society."
1848] TOUR IN CORNWALL. 275
5/^. Clomb over Isle, disappointed, went thro' the sea-tunnel-cavern over great blocks. Walls lined with shells, pink or puce jellies. Girls playing about the rocks as in a theatre.
tth. Slate quarries, one great pillar left standing; ship under the cliff loading; dived into a cavern all polished with the waves like dark marble with veins of pink and white. FoUow'd up little stream falling thro' the worn slate, smoked a pipe at little inn, dined, walked once more to the old castle darkening in the gloom.
7/^. Camelford, Slaughter Bridge, clear brook among alders. Sought for King Arthur's stone, found it at last by a rock under two or three sycamores, walked seaward, came down by churchyard. Song from ship.
%th. Walked seaward. Large crimson clover; sea purple and green like a peacock's neck. " By bays, the peacock's neck in hue."
14/^. Read part of CEdipus Colaneus.
\<jth. Finished reading Fathom^. Set oflf for Pol- perro, ripple-mark, queer old narrow-streeted place, back at 9. Turf fires on the hills; jewel-fires in the waves from the oar, which Cornish people call "bryming."
July \sL Museum. After dinner went to Perranza- buloe. Coast looked gray and grand in the fading light. Went into cave, Rembrandt-like light thro' the opening.
tth. Went to Land's End by Logan rock, leaden- backed mews wailing on cliflf, one with two young ones. Mist. Great yellow flare just before sunset. Funeral Land's End and Life's End.
%th. The Lizard, rocks in sea, two southern eyes of England ^ Tamarisk hedge in flower. Round Pen- treath beach, large crane's bill near Kynance, down to cove. Glorious grass-green monsters of waves. Into caves of Asparagus Island. Sat watching wave-rainbows.
^ Doubtless Fielding^s Ferdinand Count Fathom. * Lighthouses.
18—2
276 1846-1850. [1848
1 1 tk. Down to Lizard Cove. Smoked with work- men. Boat to several places. Saw the further ships under Penzance like beads threading the sunny shore.
\2th. Polpur. Bathed, ran in and out of cave. Down to Caerthillian, lovely clear water in cove. Lay over Pentreath beach, thunder of waves to west. Pena- luna's Cornwall.
i^th. Bathed in Polpur Cove. Bewick-like look of trunk, cloak and carpet bag, lying on rock. Sailed, could not land at Kynance. Saw the long green swell heaving on the black cliff, rowed into Pigeonthugo, dismal wailing of mews. To St Ives.
Mrs Rundle Charles S who was then Miss Rundle, allowed me to publish the following account, from her private diary, of my father's visit (during this tour) to her uncle's house near Plymouth.
We were staying at Upland, a country house belong^g to an uncle of mine four miles from Plymouth. Whilst there we were walking on the Hoe at Plymouth one day, when to my delight we were told that my father was to drive Mr Tennyson from Tavistock to pay us a visit at Upland. The clergyman's wife and other friends came to tea that afternoon, but Mr Ten- nyson did not appear. We went out for a ramble in the wood, were caught in a shower and ran home. Mr Tennyson was there, in the hall, just arrived : my father introduced me to him, and he came into the drawing-room, and said to my mother, " You have a party,** which he did not seem to like. My father then called me in to make tea for Mr Tennyson in the dining-room, and we had a quiet talk ; a powerful, thoughtful face, kind smile, hearty laugh, extremely near-sighted*. He spoke of travelling; Dresden, unsatisfactoriness of picture-gallery seeing; the first time he was in Paris he "went every day for a fortnight to the
1 Author of The ScKonberg-Cotta Family ; she died in 1896.
* He talked then with his friends of Sir Charles Napier and of his battle of Meeanee (1843), about which he half thought of making a poem, and said that WesUey the optician had told him that Sir Charles Napier and he were the two most short-sighted men in England.
1848] "LA MAITRESSE DE TITIEN." 277
Louvre, saw only one picture, 'La Maitresse de Titien/ the second time looked only at ' Narcissus lying by a stream, Echo in the distance and ferocious little Love.' " Mr Ruskin set his own thought against the united admiration of centuries, but he spoke of a " splendid chapter on Clouds " in Modem Painters,
Then he turned to Geology, Weald of Kent, Delta of a great river flowing from as far as Newfoundland. " Conceive," he said, " what an era of the world that must have been, great lizards, marshes, gigantic ferns ! " Fancied, standing by a railway at night, the engine must be like some great Ichthyosaurus. I replied how beautiful Hugh Miller's descriptions of that time are: he thought so too: then spoke of Peach, the Cornish geologist on the Preventive Service, maintaining a wife and seven children on ;£ 100 a year, whilst we in one annual dinner, champagne, turtle, etc. spend £^2^,
He spoke of the Italians as a great people (it was in 1848, the year of revolutions ^) " twice matured." He had read a poem of mine on Italy : said he felt " great interest in the Italian move- ment as in all great movements for freedom " ; that perhaps all looked equally disorderly as they arose ; that the German revo- lutions (of 1848) were miserable plagiarisms. We went into the drawing-room, I played Mendelssohn. Mr Tennyson came and talked to me about Schiller, — " Schwarmerisch, yet Schwarmerei better than mere kalter Verstand, not dramatic ; knew by heart Goethe's Gedichte * Summer breathings.' Felt the grand intellectual power of Faust^ but threw it aside in disgust at the first reading ! " Then he spoke of Milton's Latinisms, and delicate play with words, and Shakespeare's play upon words. At supper he spoke of Goethe's Tasso: he felt with Tasso, did not care for anything else in the play. "Leonora, discreet, prudential young lady, could not of course care for the poor
* He used to tell with iDfinite humour the following story, illustrating the love of a row in the hot-blooded South. ^ Edward Lear, the painter, ba^ been living at a hotel in a small town in Southern Italy, but had gone on a tour leaving his room locked up. On his return he found the place in the uproar of a mushroom revolution, the inhabitants drunk with chianti and shouting liberta and la patria through the streets. * Where is my chiaviy said he to the waiter, * of my camera to get at my roba / ' • O,' replied the waiter, not liking to be let down from his dream of a golden age, ' O che chiavel O che camera ! O che roba ! Non c* h piil chiave ! Non c^ h piii camera ! Non c^ h piu roba I Non c' h piii niente I Tutto h amore e liberty ! O che bella revoluzione ! ^ '^
278 1 846- 1 850. [l848
poet — it would not have been the thing, it would not have done : remembered only these lines :
' Es bUdet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt'"
Said he had talked of me last night and heard from Dr Beale, a clergyman of Tavistock, brother-in-law of W. H. Smith, that I knew Greek, and he said he only disliked pedantry in women. He said, " Wordsworth was great, but too one-sided to be dramatic." He spoke of the " snobbery of English society." It was getting late, so my aunt asked him to stay the night, but he said he had breakfasted alone for a dozen years ; then he said to me, ^ Ich kann nicht hier schlafen." I said, " Wanim ? " He said, " Ich kann nicht rauchen." I translated aloud, he laughed, declared he " had never been played such a trick before, chose the disguise of an obscure northern dialect, and was betrayed to everyone " ; then he said, " German has great fine words : every language is really untranslateable." Then the carriage came to take him into Plymouth : he asked to take my poems (manuscript) with him, and said, " Good-night not Good-bye." Next morning (Tuesday, July 25th) Mr Tennyson came again : he talked about lower organisms feeling less pain than higher, but would not fish : could not com- prehend the feeling of animals with ganglia, little scattered knots of nerves and no brain ; spoke of wonderful variety of forms of life, instinct of plants, etc., told the story of " a Brahmin destroying a microscope because it showed him animals killing each other in a drop of water " ; " significant, as if we could destroy facts by refusing to see them." We walked into the garden, sat on chairs at entrance of avenue ; then he laughed about some tremendous duty-woman," clergyman's wife, now Low, now High Church, always equally vehement, little brains, much conscientiousness ; husband preached one thing in the church, she another in the parish." He said it was right to "enjoy leisure," spoke of Miss Martineau's Easterti Life, did not like her, said he supposed we were not Unitarians or Pagans, although it was the fashion with literary ladies. Then he spoke of my poems, said he liked some very much, especially some lines on the gentianella: then he kindly made one or two verbal criticisms in one called "The Poet's Daily Bread." " Have you printed ? " he said. " Do not publish too early, you cannot retract." I ventured to thank him for his poems, in which we delighted. " I thank you for yours,"
«
1848] THE BOOK OF "REVELATION." 279
he said graciously. We went into the kitchen garden, he talked of flowers and cabbages, picked gooseberries, he " used as a boy to lie for hours under a gooseberry bush reading a novel, finishing his gooseberries and novel together " ; he liked the kitchen garden, "so wholesome." "I would rather stay with you bright girls than dine with Mr W.," he said. He sent away his fly, then we went into my cousin Helen's garden, and he told us stories of "an African woman, who asked to be breakfasted upon (by white men)," etc. etc. Afterwards we drove him into Plymouth. " You would not think me a shy man, but I am always shy with false or conventional people; people are sometimes affected from shyness, zxAgrow simple." Then we talked of Carlyle : "You would like him for one day," he said, "but get tired of him, so vehement and destructive " ; he gave by way of a specimen of his talk in a deep tragic voice, "For God's sake away with gigs, thousand million g^gs in the world, away with them all in God's name, spoke and axle, the world will never be right until they are all swept into the lowest pit of Tophet." He often smokes with Carlyle; "Goethe once Carlyle's hero, now Cromwell his epitome of human excellence. Carlyle spoke once as if he wished poets to be our statesmen ; fancy Bums Prime Minister!" Then he said to me, "Do you know the Odyssey ? I like it better as a whole than the Iliad: I should have met you before; why didn't you write .^ I could teach you Greek in a month, then perhaps (quoting my poem called 'The Poet's Daily Bread') you would scorn me with bitter scorn." I laughed. "I will send you the Odyssey^ I have two copies in my portmanteau; I will be grave when next I meet you; I vary." In the course of conversation he said, " Some parts of The Book of Revelation are finer in English than in Greek, e.g. ' And again they said " Alleluia " and their smoke went up forever and ever^' — magnificent conception, darkness and fire rolling together, for ever and ever."
* He would quote the tenth chapter with boundless admiration : " And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud... and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth... And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things that are therein, that there should be time no longer,^^ or, as he translated it, << that time should be no more.^^
28o 1 846-1 850. [l84d
Letters^ 1848-9.
To Aubrey de Vere {after a visit to Scotland in 1848).
Cheltenham, Oct
My dear Aubrey,
I have just now on my return to Cheltenham got two letters from you, for I am one, as you know, who wander to and fro for months careless of P. O. and correspondences. I am grieved to have occasioned you so much trouble about the article, but let it pass, excuses will not mend it : neither will I mention the money ^ troubles I have had, for they are dead and buried, tho' you bribe with your " great piece of news," which I take it must mean that you are going to be married ! is it so ? if so, joy to you. I am glad that you have thought of me at Kilkee by the great deeps. The sea is my delight, tho' Mr Chretien in the Christian Examiner says that I have no power upon him and always represent him dead asleep. I have seen many fine things in Scotland, and many fine things did I miss seeing, rolled up as they were tenfold in Scotch mists. Loch Awe too, which you call the finest, I saw. It is certainly very grand, tho' the pass disappointed me. I thought of Words- worth's lines there, and, approving much, disapproved of much in them. What can be worse than to say to old Kilchurn Castle,
"Take then thy seat, vicegerent unreproved"?
Surely, master Aubrey, that is puiBFed and false. I steamed from Oban to Skye, a splendid voyage, for the whole day, with the exception of three hours in the
^ His friends tried to persuade him to write popular short poems in magazines, but, however poor be might be, he never could or would write a line for money offered.
1848] IMPRESSIONS OF SCOTLAND. 28 1
morning, was blue and sunny ; and I think I saw more outlines of hills than ever I saw in my life ; and exqui- sitely shaped are those Skye mountains. Loch Corusk, said to be the wildest scene in the Highlands, I failed in seeing. After a fatiguing expedition over the roughest ground on a wet day we arrived at the banks of the loch, and made acquaintance with the extremest tiptoes of the hills, all else being thick wool-white fog. Dunkeld is lovely, and I delighted in Inverary, tho' there likewise I got drenched to the skin, till my very hat wept tears of ink. I rejoiced in Killeen, but on the whole perhaps I enjoyed no day more than the one I spent at Kirk AUoway by the monument of poor Burns, and the or- chards, and " banks and braes of bonny Doon." I made a pilgrimage thither out of love for the great peasant; they were gathering in the wheat and the spirit of the man mingled or seemed to mingle with all I saw. I know you do not care much for him, but I do, and hold that there never was immortal poet if he be not one. Farewell. Give my best love and remembrances to all
yours, and
Believe me ever yours,
A. To Aubrey de Vere.
[Undated.']
My dear Aubrey,
I have just returned to this place whence I think I wrote to you last, and hither your letter after travelling Cheltenhamward and otherwhere followed me. I assure you I experienced a very lively gratification in finding that my recent alterations ^ had met your approval and not your's only but your mother's and sister's. I am still not quite satisfied with it, and I think that one or two of the ballads might be improved or others substi- tuted, but I have done with it at present. I gave it up
1 In " The Princess."
282 1 846-1 850. [l84S
to the printer in a rage at last and left London, not having revised the last proofs, and so I see there is a mistake or two, for instance " marbled stairs " which is vile. Don't you think too that the Dedication to Harry Lushington looks very queer, dated " January, '48," the French row taking place in the February following, and such allusions and the subsequent ones made in the Epilogue ! Well, I suppose that does not much matter, and I am as I said vastly gratified with your good opinion of the improvements.
I wrote so far — now I am in town for a week or so.
Now for your two queries.
I have not the Edinburgh with me, and so cannot give you the exact passage in the critique ; but I know there is mention made therein of "The Princess" coming out among the dying and the dead. Now I certainly did not mean to kill anyone, and therefore I put this new line into the old king's mouth,
I trust that there is no one hurt to death, and in the old tourneys it really did happen now and then that there was only a certain amount of bruises and bangs and no death. Perhaps the Editor, not you, inserted the passage. With respect to the " Elegies \" I cannot say that I have turned my attention to them lately. I do not know whether I have done anything new in that quarter since you saw them, but I believe I am going to print them, and then I need not tell you that you will be perfectly welcome to a copy, on the condition that when the book is published, this avant-courier of it shall be either sent back to me, or die the death by fire in Curragh Chase. I shall print about twenty-five copies, and let them out among friends under the same condi- tion of either return or cremation. The review in the Westminster was not one of " The Princess," but of two or three of the old Poems.
* ** In Memoriam."
1840] MRS GASKELL AND SAMUEL BAMFORD. 283
I have sent you a most shabby note in return for your long and agreeable one, but pray forgive me : I have such a heap of correspondence just now, half of which will never get answered at all.
Love to your brother and his wife, your mother and sister. I don't know, but I feel quite sorry that Caroline (Standish) is married. She did so well unmarried, and looked so pure and maidenly that I feel it quite a pity that she should have changed her state.
Ever yours, dear Aubrey,
A. Tennyson.
The following four letters refer to what my father called " the highest honour I have yet received."
(i) From Mrs Gaskell to John Forster.
Manchester, Oct. ^th, 1849.
I want to ask for your kind offices. You know Tennyson, and you know who Samuel Bamf ord is, a great, gaunt, stalwart Lancashire man, formerly hand-loom weaver, author of Life of a Radical, age nearly 70, and living in that state which is exactly decent poverty with his neat little apple-faced wife. They have lost their only child. Bamf ord is the most hearty (and it's saying a good deal) admirer of Tennyson I know. I dislike recitations exceedingly, but he repeats some of Tennyson's poems in so rapt and yet so simple a manner, utterly forgetting that anyone is by in the delight of the music and the exquisite thoughts, that one can't help liking to hear him. He does not care one jot whether people like him or not in his own intense enjoyment. He says when he lies awake at night, as in his old age he often does, and gets sadly thinking of the days that are gone when his child was alive, he soothes himself by repeating T.'s poems. I asked him the other day if he had got them of his own. " No," be said rather mournfully : he had been long looking out for a second-hand copy, but somehow they had not got into the old book-shops, and 14^. or i8j. (which are they }) was too much for a poor man, and then he brightened up and said. Thank God he had a good memory, and whenever he got into a house where there were Tennyson's poems he learnt as many as he could by
284 1 846-1 850. [lM9
heart He thought he knew better than twelve, and began " OEnone," and then the " Sleepmg Beauty." Now I wonder if you catch a glimpse of what I want I thought at first of giving him the poems this Xmas, but then I thought you would perhaps ask Tennyson if he would give Bamf ord a copy from himself which would be glorious for the old man. Dear, how he would triumph.
(2) To John Forster.
Mablethorpe, Alford, Lincolnshire. 1849.
My dear Forster,
I got both your notes almost at the same
time. I have been flying about from house to house for
a long time, and yours was delivered to me at a place
called Scremby Hall in this county where I was making
a morning call. All that account of Sam. Bamford is
very interesting indeed. I reckon his admiration as the
highest honour I have yet received. A lady was so
charmed with the relation that I gave her the letter. Of
course I will give him a copy but I shall not be in town
for a fortnight. The first thing I do will be to call at
Moxon's and get him one. I am here on this desolate
sea-coast. My friends have feted me in this county
so long that I think it high time to move, but they will
not let me go yet. How have you been, my dear boy }
I trust well. In the hope of seeing you as soon as
possible,
I am, yours as ever,
A. Tennyson ^ (3) From Mrs Gaskell to John Forster.
FRIDAY; Dec, 1th, 1849.
I have not yet taken my bonnet off after hunting up Bamford. First of all we went to Blakeley to his little white-
^ He indosed to Forster for the Examiner, March 24th, ^ You might have won the poefs fame": reprinted in the Poetns (sixth ed.), 1850.
1849] MRS GASKELL AND SAMUEL BAMFORD. 285
washed cottage. His wife was cleaning, and regretted her "master" was not at home. He had gone into Manchester, where she did not know. I shan't go into the details of the hunting of this day. At last we pounced upon the great gray stalwart man coming out of a little old-fashioned public-house where Blakeley people put up. When I produced my book he said, "This is grand." I said, " Look at the title-page," for I saw he was fairly caught by something he liked in the middle of the book, and was standing reading it in the street. " Well, I. am a proud man this day ! " he exclaimed. Then he turned it up and down and read a bit (it was a very crowded street) and his gray face went quite brown-red with pleasure. Suddenly he stopped. " What must I do for him back again ? " " Oh ! you must write to him, and thank him." " I'd rather walk 20 mile than write a letter any day." " Well, then, suppose you set off this Christmas, and walk and thank Tennyson." He looked up from his book, right in my face, quite indignant. "Woman! walking won't reach him. We're on the earth don't ye see, but he's there, up above. I can no more reach him by walking than if he were an eagle or a skylark high above my head." It came fresh, warm, straight from the heart, without a motion or making a figurative speech, but as if it were literal truth, and I were a goose for not being aware of it. Then he dipped down again into his book, and began reading aloud the "Sleeping Beauty," and in the middle stopped to look at the writing again. And we left him in a sort of sleep-walking state, and only trust he will not be nm over.
(4) From Samuel Bamford to Alfred Tennyson.
Blakeley, Dec, i$/h, 1849. Dear Sir,
Mrs Gaskell a few days since presented to me your poems, with your autograph, in kind terms, and I can only say, as to the present, that I am very greatly obliged ; and that you could not have done anything that would have pleased me better. Accept my most sincere thanks.
Your poems, I cannot forget them. I cannot put them away from my thoughts ; the persons and the scenes they represent
286 1 846- 1 850. [l849
haunt me. I have read them all over and over, and I have not awakened once this night without
Thy heart, my life, my love, my bride
immediately recurring to my thoughts.
Oh ! your " Oriana " has started the tears into my eyes, and into those of my dear wife, many a time. It is a deep thing. Your "Locksley Hall" is terribly beautiful; profoundly impres- sive. The departure of your "Sleeping Palace'* is almost my favourite, and your " Gardener's Daughter," ah ! it brings early scenes to my mind.
The story of my early love that haunts me now I'm old, And broods within my very heart altho' 'tis well-nigh cold.
My wife, bless her! I never feel my sensibilities gushing over, but when I look I find hers are doing the same. And it has frequently been the case since I was so fortunate as to have your poems.
But your English ! why it is almost unlimitedly expressive. This language of ours, what can it not be made to say ? What height, what depth filled with all glorious hues, terrible glooms, and vivid flashes does it not combine and your poems exhibit all ?
Are you well? Are you happy? I hope you are both. Accept my kindest wishes, and beUeve me to be
Yours most truly,
Samuel Bamford.
To Miss HoUoway (of Spilsby) my father wrote about her cousin Miss Jean Ingelow's poems, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings.
My DEAR Miss Holloway,
Many thanks for your very kind note. I have only just returned to town, and found the Rhyming Chronicle. Your Cousin must be worth knowing : there are some very charming things in her book, at least it seems so to me, tho* I do not pique myself on being much of a critic at first sight, and I really have only
1849] JEAN INGELOW'S POEMS. 287
skimmed a few pages. Yet I think I may venture to pronounce that she need not be ashamed of publishing them. Certain things I saw which I count abomina- tions, tho' I myself in younger days have been guilty of the same, and so was Keats. I would sooner lose a pretty thought than enshrine it in such rhymes as " Eudora " " before her," " vista " " sister." She will get to hate them herself as she grows older, and it would be a pity that she should let her book go forth with these cockneyisms. If the book were not so good I should not care for these specks, but the critics will pounce upon them, and excite a prejudice. I declare I should like to know her.
I have such a heap of correspondence to answer that I must bid you good-bye. What the German lady says is very gratifying. I shall perhaps see you again in the autumn. My best remembrances to each and all of your circle.
Ever yours truly, A. Tennyson.
P.S. Strange ! that I did not see it. I turn to the title-page, and find the book is published. I fancied it had only been printed. Forgive my hurry ! Well, your cousin will amend, perhaps, the errors I have mentioned, in her next edition.
On the invitation of Aubrey de Vere, my father paid his second visit to Ireland ; but he has left no record of his tour. At my request Mr de Vere has kindly written the following account : to which he has added some reminiscences of his first hearing " In Memoriam " read in 1850.
In the year 1848 Alfred Tennyson had felt a craving to make a lonely sojourn at Bude: "I hear," he said, " that there are larger waves there than on any other part of the British coast : and must go thither and be alone with God." I persuaded him to
288 1846-185O. [l84a-
come also to Ireland where the waves are far higher and the cliffs often rise to 800 feet and in one spot, Slieve League, to 20CX) : while at the mountain's landward side are still shown the "prayer-stations'* of Saint Columbkill. He passed five weeks with us at Curragh Chase, to us delightful weeks. The day before our arrival we visited the celebrated " fall '* of the Shannon at Castleconnel ; over it there hung a full moon, the largest I have ever seen. The aspect might well have shaken weak nerves. It looked as if the " centrifugal *' force had ceased, and the vast luminary might come down upon the earth in another hoiu*. That night we slept in my sister's house, and she had the satisfaction of conversing with the Poet whose works she had fed on since her girlhood.
The weeks passed by only too rapidly. We drove our guest to the old Castles and Abbeys in the neighbourhood : he was shocked at the poverty of the peasantry, and the marks of havock wrought through the country by the great potato-famine: he read in the library ; and worked on a new edition of " The Princess," smoking at the same time without hindrance in our most comfortable bedroom, and protected as far as possible from noise ; he walked where he pleased alone, or in company through woods in which it was easy to lose oneself, by a cave so deep that Merlin might have slept in it to this day unawakened. In the evenings he had vocal music from Lady de Vere and her sister, Caroline Standish, and Sonatas of Mozart or Beethoven played by my eldest brother, with a power and pathos rare in an amateur. Later, he read poetry to us with a voice that doubled its power, commonly choosing pathetic pieces ; and on one occasion after finishing "A Sorrowful Tale " by Crabbe, glanced round reproachfully and said, " I do not see that any of you are weeping ! " One night we turned his poem of " The Day-Dream " into an acted charade ; a beautiful g^rl whom he used to call "that stately maid," taking the part of the Sleeping Beauty; and the poet himself that of the Prince who broke the spell of her slumber. Another night there was a dance which he de- nounced as a stupid thing, while a brilliant and amusing person. Lady G., who was accustomed to speak her mind to all alike, scolded him sharply. " How would the world get on if others went about it growling at its amusements in a voice as deep as a lion's } I request that you will go upstairs, put on an evening coat, and ask my daughter Sophia to dance." He did so, and
I860] HIS HIGH SPIRITS. 289
was the gayest of the gay for several hours, turning out moreover an excellent dancer. He was liked all the better for always saying what came into his head. One day a young lady who sat next him at dinner, spoke of a certain marriage just announced, as a very penniless one. He rummaged in his pocket, extracted a penny, and slapped it down loudly close to her plate saying, "There, I give you that, for that is the God you worship." The girl was a little frightened, but more amused: they made friends; and he promised to send her a pocket copy of Milton. Some months later she received one from England, beautifully bound.
It was a time of political excitement, and Ireland was on the brink of that silly attempt at rebellion which put back all her serious interests for a quarter of a century. Half Europe was in revolt and the prophets of the day averred that England might any day find herself involved in a general war. Some one remarked that an invasion would be more practicable in these days of steamships than in those of Nelson and Napoleon. Tennyson was a Patriot-poet like Shakespeare, who gave us the glorious dying speech of "Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster," the Patriot-prince. His reply was, "Don't let them land on England's coast, or we will shatter them to pieces."
We took care that our guest should see or hear something of Ireland's quaint humours : I must find room for one story which especially amused him, and which he often retold. Re- turning home recently after a fortnight's absence, I had visited our old Parish Priest, Father Tim, and found him at dinner with his curate. It had been a time of great disturbance: many houses had been attacked by night, many guns borne ofif in triumph, and much blood shed. In answer to my enquiries he said : " The country has been quiet enough, much as usual, except one disgraceful outrage, such as no one ever heard of before in Ireland. What would you think, Sir, of a girl being carried off by night, and no car sent for her ? " It had long been a traditional usage in Ireland, when parents on unreason- able grounds resisted their daughter's marriage, for her lover and his friends to carry her off, apparently by force, but in reality with her connivance. After a few days the parents had to accept what they could not then avert ; but the abduction was a ceremonial in which the Sabine Maid was always treated
with entire respect " Sir, I ask you," said Father Tim to his T. I. 19
290 1 846- 1 850. [l848-
curate, laying down his knife and fork, and his old face flushing up, "as long as you are on the mission, did you ever hear of a girl being carried off, and no car sent for her ? " " Never, Sir," was the answer, "and it would not be a common car, but a side-car." " Yes," Father Tim rejoined, " and moreover a woman would be sent for her with the party, to keep her in courage." "To be sure there would," the curate replied; "and a most respectable woman." For several minutes the affirmation and the response were alternated more and more loudly and with stronger gesticulations ; " A car would be sent ! " " Aye, and a side-car ! " "A woman would be sent ! " " Aye, and a most respectable woman ! " The old priest ended, " I am afraid old Ireland is going to the bad! Well, thank Heaven it did not happen in my parish; but it happened within a hundred yards of it! A girl of the Molonys, one of the old stock ! " Neither priest finished his poor dinner of bacon and cabbage that day. This violation of traditional etiquette led to consequences which justified Father Tim's last words, "Well, God is good ! it did not happen in my parish ! " For more than two years that parish had been the prey of eight marauders who roamed at large, plundering or making the farmers pay black-mail. They defied alike magistrate, police and country- gentlemen ; for though everyone knew who they were, no one dared to give information. Not so that daughter of the old stock. The rogues had carried her to the house of an old woman in complicity with the enterprise, but who, on recogniz- ing in the girl a fifth cousin of her aunt's, placed her in her own bed and sent off the adventurers without a glass of whisky. At the risk of her life the girl went to a magistrate, gave infor- mation against the gang, and promised to swear to it in Court, on one condition. It was that one man should not be pro- ceeded against. The other seven, she affirmed, were blackguards, who had not so much as given her time to dress herself "anyway tidy " ; and who had dragged her without a shoe on her feet through three muddy fields ; but there was one man of a better sort who had " behaved mighty polished " to her, hoisting her up on his shoulders once when they crossed a bog. The "polished" man was forgiven, and probably begged pardon of Father Tim, and returned to his duties : the other seven were transported, and probably made their fortunes in the Colonies ; and the parish had peace.
I860] VISIT TO VALENCIA. 2^1
Alfred Tennyson's desire to see cliflFs and waves revived, and we sent him to our cousin, Maurice FitzGerald, Knight of Kerry, who lived at Valencia where they are seen at their best. On his way thither he slept at Mount Trenchard, the residence of Lord Monteagle, and I led him to the summit of Knock Patrick, the farthest spot in the South West to which Ireland's Apostle, Patriarch and Patron, advanced. There while from far and near from both sides of the Shannon the people flocked round him, Saint Patrick preached his far-famed sermon and gave his benediction to the Land, its mountains and its plains, its pastures, its forests, its rivers and the sands under the rivers. The sunset was one of extraordinary but minatory beauty. It gave, I remember, a darksome glory to the vast and desolate expanse with all its creeks and inlets from the Shannon, lighted the green islands in the mouth of the Fergus, fired the ruined Castle of Shanid, a stronghold of the Desmonds, one of a hundred which they were said to have possessed. The western clouds hung low, a mass of crimson and gold ; while, from the ledge of a nearer one, down plunged a glittering flood empurpled like wine. The scene was a thoroughly Irish one ; and gave a stormy welcome to the Sassenach Bard. The next morning he pursued his way alone to Valencia. He soon wrote that he had enjoyed it. He had found there the highest waves that Ireland knows, cliffs that at one spot rise to the height of 600 feet, tamarisks and fuchsias that no sea-winds can in- timidate, and the old " Knight of Kerry," who, at the age of nearly 80, preserved the spirits, the grace and the majestic beauty of days gone by — as chivalrous a representative of Des- mond's great Norman House as it had ever put forth in those times when it fought side by side with the greatest Gaelic Houses, for Ireland's ancient faith, and the immemorial rights of its Palatinate ^ Afterwards Tennyson visited Killamey but
1 On his eighty-second birthday my father received the following letter:
Calvsrley Park, Tunbridge Wells,
August 6/At 1891.
''Long life to your honour,^ as Irish peasants used to say, and so say I, the man who was working the State quarry, on the Island of Valencia, when you spent a few days there in 1848, Chartist times in London and Fenian times in Ireland. I remember your telling us, not without some glee, how a Valencian Fenian stealthily dogged your footsteps up the
19—3
292 1 846- 1 850. [i84a-
remained there only a few days ; yet that visit bequeathed a memorial. The echoes of the bugle at Killarney on that love- liest of lakes inspired the song introduced into the second edi- tion of his " Princess," beginning
The splendour falls on castle walls.
It is but due to Killarney that both the parents of that lyric should be remembered in connection with " that fair child be- tween them bom"; and through that song, Killarney will be re- called to the memory of many who have seen yet half forgotten it. When they read those stanzas, and yet more when they hear them fittingly sung, they will see again, as in a dream, the reach of its violet-coloured waters where they reflect the " Purple Mountain," the "Elfland" of its Black Valley, " Croom- a-doof," the silver river that winds and flashes through wood and rock, connecting the mystic " Upper Lake," and the beetling rock of the " Eagle's Nest" with the two larger and sunnier but not lovelier lakes. Before them again will rise Dinis Island, with its embowered coves and their golden sands, the mountain gardens of Glena haunted by murmurs of the cascade, not distant, but shrouded by the primeval oak-woods. They will look again on that island, majestic at once and mournful, Inis- f alien, its grey-stemmed and solemn groves, its undulating lawns,
mountain and coming at last close to your ear, whispered, <<Be you from France?"
Your sonorous reading to us alter dinner sundry truculent passages in Daniel O^ConnelPs History of Ireland^ which happened to be lying on my table, has lingered in my ears ever since. Seeing among my few books all that your friend Carlyle had up to that time published, you told me you thought he had nothing more to say. I was often reminded of this whilst reading his subsequent CronvweU and Frederick and Latter Days, and how near that was to the truth. You will hardly have forgotten the old Knight of Kerry, the owner of the Island, his dignified presence and his redolence of Grattan and Curran and Castlereagh and the Irish Parliament in which he sat for many years. I don't know whether "the rude imperious surge" which lashes the sounding shore of the Island ever drew from you, as I had hoped, some "hoarse rough verse," some of that roar, which tells us, as " music tells us, of what in all our life we have never known, and never will know."
With the " troops of friends " this day wishing you long life, heartily joins the ci-devant quarryman and
Yours truly, Bewicks Blackburne.
(J^ow also Octogenarian.)
1850] THE BEAUTIES OF KILLARNEY. 293
which embosom the ruins of that Abbey, the shelter from cen- tury to century of Ireland's Annalists. They will muse again in the yew-roofed cloister of Muckross, and glide once more by its cavemed and fantastic rocks, and promontories fringed by arbutus brakes, with their dark yet shining leaves, their scarlet berries and their waxen flowers. Whatever is fairest in other lakes they will see here combined, as if Nature had amused herself by publishing a volume of poetic selections from all her works. As the vision fades, their eyes will rest long on the far mountains that girdle all that beauty, mountains here and there dark with those yew-forests through which the wild deer of old escaped from the stag-hounds of MacCarthymore. It is marvellous that so many of the chief characteristics of Killamey should have found place in a poem so short
We met next in London. Few of the hours I spent with Alfred survive with such a pathetic sweetness and nearness in my recollection as those which are associated with that time and with " In Memoriam," which, as he told me, he once thought of entitling " Fragments of an Elegy." Soon after this he pub- lished the poem.
I went to him very late each night, and he read many of the poems to me or discussed them with me till the early hours of the morning. The tears often ran down his face as he read, without the slightest apparent consciousness of them on his part. The pathos and grandeur of these poems were to me greatly increased by the voice which rather intoned than recited them, and which, as was obvious, could not possibly have given them utterance in any manner not thus musical. Sometimes towards the close of a stanza his voice dropped ; but I avoided the chance of thus losing any part of the meaning by sitting beside him, and glancing at the pieces he read. They were written in a long and narrow manuscript book, which assisted him to arrange the poems in due order by bringing many of them at once before his eye. As I walked home alone in the early mornings, the noises had ceased in each " long unlovely street " ; and the deep voice which had so long charmed me followed me still, and seemed to waft me along as if I had glided onward half-asleep in a gondola. I have ever regarded " In Memoriam " as the finest of the Poet's works. As in the case of Dante, a great sorrow had been the harbinger of a song greater still : Dante had vowed to celebrate Beatrice as no other
/
294 1 846-1 850. [1848-60
woman had ever been celebrated ; and he kept that vow. The Northern Poet had also in early youth lost his chief friend, and after the lapse of seventeen years commended him to a fame such as neither "Lycidas" nor " Adonais" had ever inherited. Many y of Tennyson's poems are " of imagination all compact." In " In Memoriam " imagination claims less, comparatively, to win more. In this work each successive feeling and thought ascend from the depths of the Poet's heart, as the fountain's bubbles mount from the gold sands beneath it, and pass thence through the imagination, in progress to the sympathies of mankind. Natural description is here too invested with its finest function, for throughout it blends itself most subtly with the human affections, now adding to their sorrow, and now assuaging it: and here Poetic Art finds its aptest opportunities, for each of the pieces, while it constitutes part of a great whole, is itself so brief that it admits of the highest, most palpable perfection of shape. Tennyson was a true artist because he was not an artist only. He understood the relations in which Art stands to Nature and to fact. An incident will illustrate this remark. It had often seemed to me that though " In Memoriam " had been designed by its author chiefly as a monument raised to his friend, it was also regarded by him as a work which carried a spiritual teaching with it : it taught that the history of a great sorrow is the history of a soul ; and that a soul which passes bravely through the dark shadow of the planet of grief must, on emerging thence, meet the sunrise at its remoter side. Long after the pub- lication of " In Memoriam " I reminded him of what he had let fall on that subject, and added that such a scheme of poetic thought if carried out to the full, would create, in a lyrical form, a work not without much analogy to Dante's Divina Coinmedia^ the first part of which is all woe, though the latter cantos of the second part, the " Purgatorio," abound in consolation and peace ; while the third part, the " Paradiso," is the song of triumph and of joy. I remarked that many of the later pieces in the second part of " In Memoriam " were also songs of consolation and peace, and suggested that perhaps he might at some later time gfive to the whole work its third part, or Paradise. The poet's answer was this : " I have written what I have felt and known ; and I will never write anything else."
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CHAPTER XIV.*
''IN MEMORIAM."
Break, breaky break.
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman^s boy, That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanishM hand. And the sound of a voice that is still !
Break, break, break.
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Half a mile to the south of Clevedon in Somerset-^ shire, on a lonely hill, stands Clevedon Church, " obscure and solitary," overlooking a wide expanse of water, where the Severn flows into the Bristol Channel. It is dedicated to St Andrew, the chancel being the original fishermen's chapel.
From the graveyard you can hear the music of the tide as it washes against the low cliffs not a hundred yards away. In the manor aisle of the church, under
^ Copyright, 1897, by The MacmilUui Company.
295
296 "IN MEMORIAM." [l850
which is the vault of the Hallams, may be read this epitaph to Arthur Hallam, written by his father:
TO THE MEMORY OF
ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM
ELDEST SON OF HENRY HALLAM ESQUIRE
AND OF JULIA MARIA HIS WIFE
DAUGHTER OF SIR ABRAHAM ELTON BARONET
OF CLEVEDON COURT
WHO WAS SNATCHED AWAY BY SUDDEN DEATH
AT VIENNA ON SEPTEMBER 15TH 1833
IN THE TWENTY-THIRD YEAR OF HIS AGE
AND NOW IN THIS OBSCURE AND SOLITARY CHURCH
REPOSE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF
ONE TOO EARLY LOST FOR PUBUC FAME
BUT ALREADY CONSPICUOUS AMONG HIS CONTEMPORARIES
FOR THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS GENIUS
THE DEPTH OF HIS UNDERSTANDING
THE NOBLENESS OF HIS DISPOSITION
THE FERVOUR OF HIS PIETY
AND THE FURTIY OF HIS LIFE
VALE DULCISSIME
VALE DELECnSSIME DESIDERATISSIME
REQUIESCAS IN PACE
PATER AC MATER HIC POSTHAC REQUIESCAMUS TECUM
USQUE AD TUBAM
In this part of the church there is also another tablet to the memory of Henry Hallam, the epitaph written by my father: who thought the simpler the epitaph, the better it would become the simple and noble man, whose work speaks for him :
HERE WrrH HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN RESTS HENRY HALLAM THE HISTORIAN
I860] THE MANUSCRIPT OF " IN MEMORIAM." 297
It was not until May 1850 that " In Memoriam " was printed and given to a few friends. Shortly afterwards it was published, first of all anonymously, but the authorship was soon discovered.
The earliest jottings, begun in 1 833, of the " Elegies " as they were then called, were nearly lost in a London lodging, for my father was always careless about his manuscripts.
Mr Coventry Patmore wrote to me about this :
The letter from your father concerning the MS of "In Memoriam " I gave to the late Sir John Simeon, thinking that he ought to have it, as he had the MS^ itself. This letter asked roe to visit the lodging in Momington Place, Hampstead Road, which he had occupied two or three weeks before, and to try to recover the MS, which he had left in a closet where he was used to keep some of his provisions. The landlady said that no such book had been left, but I insisted on looking for it myself, and found it where your father said it was.
The letter alluded to is given below :
BONCHURCH, I. W.,
Feb. 28M, 1850.
My dear Coventry,
I went up to my room yesterday to get my book of Elegies : you know what I mean, a long, butcher- ledger-like book. I was going to read one or two to an artist here : I could not find it. I have some obscure remembrance of having lent it to you. If so, all is well, if not, will you go to my old chambers and institute a vigorous inquiry ? I was coming up to-day on purpose to look after it, but as the weather is so furious I have yielded to the wishes of my friends here to stop till to-morrow. I shall be, I expect, in town to-morrow at 25 M. P. when I shall be glad to see you. At 9.10 p.m. the train in which I come gets into London. I shall be
1 This MS, given to Sir John Simeon by my fiiUier, has been generously returned to me by Lady Simeon.
298 "IN MEMORIAM.** [i860
in Mornington Place about 10 o'clock I suppose. Perhaps you would in your walk Museum-ward call on Mrs Lloyd and tell her to prepare for me. With best remem- brances to Mrs Patmore,
Believe me ever yours,
A. Tennyson.
At first the reviews of the volume were not on the whole sympathetic. One critic in a leading journal, for instance, considered that " a great deal of poetic feeling had been wasted," and " much shallow art spent on the tenderness shown to an Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar." Another referred to the poem as follows : " These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man." However, men like Maurice and Robertson thought that the author had made a defi- nite step towards the unification of the highest religion and philosophy with the progressive science of the day ; and that he was the one poet who " through almost the agonies of a death-struggle " had made an effective stand against his own doubts and difficulties and those of the time, "on behalf of those first principles which underlie all creeds, which belong to our earliest child- hood, and on which the wisest and best have rested through all ages ; that all is right ; that darkness shall be clear ; that God and Time are the only interpreters ; that Love is King ; that the Immortal is in us ; that, which is the keynote of the whole, *A11 is well, tho' Faith and Form be sundered in the night of Fear ^' " Scientific leaders like Herschel, Owen, Sedgwick and Tyndall regarded him as a champion of Science, and cheered
^ Robertson goes so fiur as to say : ^ To my mind and heart the most satisfactory things that have been ever said on the future state are con- tained in this poem."
The best analysis of ^ In Memoriam " is by Miss Chapman (MacmiUan and Co.)*
I860] Gladstone's memories of Arthur hallam. 299
him with words of genuine admiration for his love of Nature, for the eagerness with which he welcomed all the latest scientific discoveries, and for his trust in truth. Science indeed in his opinion was one of the main forces tending to disperse the superstition that still darkens the world. A review which he thought one of the ablest was that by Mr Gladstone. From this review I quote the following to show that in Glad- stone's opinion my father had not over-estimated Arthur Hallam.
In 1850 Mr Tennyson gave to the world under the title of " In Memoriam," perhaps the richest oblation ever offered by the affection of friendship at the tomb of the departed. The memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833, at the age of twenty-two, will doubtless live chiefly in connection with this volume. But he is well known to have been one who, if the term of his days had been prolonged, would have needed no aid from a friendly hand, would have built his own enduring monument, and would have bequeathed to his country a name in all likelihood greater than that of his very distinguished father. The writer of this paper was, more than half a century ago, in a condition to say
** I marked him As a far Alp ; and loved to watch the sunrise Dawn on his ample brow^."
There perhaps was no one among those who were blessed with his friendship, nay, as we see, not even Mr Tennyson^, who did not feel at once bound closely to him by commanding affection, and left far behind by the rapid, full and rich develop- ment of his ever-searching mind ; by his
" All-comprehensive tenderness. All-subtilising intellect."
It would be easy to show what in the varied forms of human excellence, he might, had life been granted him, have accom- plished ; much more difficult to point the finger and to say, "This
* De Vere's Mary Tudor iv. i.
* See ^ In Memoriam,*^ cix., ex., cxi., cxii., cxm.
300 "IN MEMORIAM." [i860
he never could have done." Enough remains from among his early efforts, to accredit whatever mournful witness may now be borne of him. But what can be a nobler tribute than this, that for seventeen years after his death a poet, fast rising towards the lofty summits of his art, found that young fading image the richest source of his inspiration, and of thoughts that gave him buoyancy for a flight such as he had not hitherto attained^.
Bishop Westcott and Professor Henry Sidgwick have written me interesting letters which respectively give the impressions the poem made on Cambridge men in 1850, and in i860, and I quote them in extenso.
The Bishop writes :
When " In Memoriam " appeared, I felt (as I feel if possible more strongly now) that the hope of man lies in the historic realization of the Gospel. I rejoiced in the Introduction, which appeared to me to be the mature summing up after an interval of the many strains of thought in the " Elegies." Now the stress of controversy is over, I think so still. As I look at my original copy of " In Memoriam," I recognise that what impressed me most was your father's splendid faith (in the face of the frankest acknowledgment of every difficulty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the indi- vidual man as he offers himself for the fulfilment of his little part (Lrv., Lxxxi., Lxxxn. and the closing stanzas). This faith has now largely entered into our common life, and it seems to me to express a lesson of the Gospel which the circumstances of all time encourage us to master.
Professor Sidgwick writes :
After thinking over the matter, it has seemed to me better to write to you a somewhat different kind of letter from that which I originally designed : a letter not primarily intended for publication, though I wish you to feel at liberty to print any part of it which you may find suitable, but primarily intended to serve rather as a " document " on which you may base any statements you may wish to make as to the impression produced by " In Memoriam." I have decided to adopt this course :
* Gladstone's Gleanings of Past Yearsy Vol. n., pp. 136-37.
ISeOJ PROF. SIDGWICK ON " IN MEMORIAM." 3OI
because I want to write with rather more frank egotism than I should otherwise like to show. I want to do this, because in describing the impression made on me by the poem, I ought to make clear the point of view from which I approached it, and the attitude of thought which I retained under its influence. In what follows I shall be describing chiefly my own experiences : but I shall allow myself sometimes to say " we " rather than " I," meaning by "we" my generation, as known to me, through converse with intimate friends.
To begin, then: our views on religious matters were not, at any rate after a year or two of the discussion started in i860 by Essays and Reviews^ really in harmony with those which we found suggested by " In Memoriam." They were more sceptical and less Christian, in any strict sense of the word : certainly this was the case with myself: I remember feeling that Clough represented my individual habits of thought and sentiment more than your father, although as a poet he moved me less. And this more sceptical attitude has remained mine through life; while at the same time I feel that the beliefs in God and in immortality are vital to human well-being.
Hence the most important influence of " In Memoriam " on my thought, apart from its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in a region,; if I may so say, deeper down than the difference between Theism and Christianity : it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity. And this influence, I And, has increased rather than diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In the sixties I should say that these deeper issues were some- what obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma, and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. You may remember Browning's reference to this period —
" The Essays and Reviews debate Begins to tell on the public mind And Colenso's words have weight"
During these years we were absorbed in struggling for free- dom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion: and perhaps what we sympathize with most in " In Memoriam " at
302 "in MEMORIAM," [i860
this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of " honest doubt," the reconciliation of knowledge and faith^in the introductory poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year —
Ring out the thousand wars of old. Ring in the thousand years of peace,
and generally t)\t forward movement of the thought.
Well, the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call " Hebrew old clothes " is over. Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to ? It brings us face to face with atheistic science : the faith in God and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to be in the air: and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the " fight with death " which " In Memoriam " so powerfully presents.
What " In Memoriam " did for us, for me at least, in this struggle was to impress on us the ineffaceable and ineradicable conviction that humanity will not and cannot acquiesce in a godless world : the " man in men " will not do this, whatever individual men may do, whatever they may temporarily feel themselves driven to do, by following methods which they cannot abandon to the conclusions to which these methods at present seem to lead.
The force with which it impressed this conviction was not due to the mere intensity of its expression of the feelings which Atheism outrages and Agnosticism ignores: but rather to its expression of them along with a reverent docility to the lessons of science which also belongs to the essence of the thought of our age.
I remember being struck with a note in Nature^ at the time of your father's death, which dwelt on this last-mentioned aspect of his work, and regarded him as preeminently the Poet of Science. I have always felt this characteristic important in estimating his effect on his generation. Wordsworth's attitude towards Nature was one that, so to say, left Science unregarded : the Nature for which Wordsworth stirred our feelings was Nature as known by simple observation and interpreted by religious and sjrmpathetic intuition. But for your father the physical world is always the world as known to us through physical science : the scientific view of it dominates his thoughts about
I860] "NOW ARE WE THE SONS OF GOD." 303
it ; and his general acceptance of this view is real and sincere, even when he utters the intensest feeling of its inadequacy to satisfy our deepest needs. Had it been otherwise, had he met the atheistic tendencies of modern Science with more confident defiance, more confident assertion of an Intuitive Faculty of theological knowledge, overriding the results laboriously reached by empirical science, I think his antagonism to these tendencies would have been far less impressive.
I always feel this strongly in reading the memorable lines :
«
If e'er, when faith had fallen asleep " down to " I have felt '."
At this point, if the stanzas had stopped here, we should have shaken our heads and said, " Feeling must not usurp the function of Reason. Feeling is not knowing. It is the duty of a rational being to follow truth wherever it leads."
But the poet's instinct knows this ; he knows that this usurpation by Feeling of the function of Reason is too bold and confident ; accordingly in the next stanza he gives the turn to humility in the protest of Feeling which is required (I think) to win the assent of the " man in men " at this stage of human thought
These lines I can never read without tears. I feel in them
the indestructible and malienable minimum of faith which
humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life ; and
which I know that I, at least so far as the man in me is deeper
/than the methodical thinker, cannot give up.
If the possibility of a " godless world " is excluded, the faith thus restored is, for the poet, unquestionably a form of Christian faith : there seems to him then no reason for doubting that the
Sinless years That breathed beneath the Syrian blue,
and the marvel of the life continued after the bodily death, were a manifestation of the "immortal love" which by faith we embrace as the essence of the Divine nature. " If the dead rise not, Christ is not risen": but if we may believe that they rise, then it seems to him, we may and must believe the main drift of the Gospel story; though we may transiently
1 Sec pp. 3I4-I5*
304 "IN MEMORIAM." [i860
wonder why the risen Lord told his disciples only of life, and nothing of " what it is to die ^."
From this point of view the note of Christian faith struck in the introductory stanzas is in harmony with all that follows. And yet I have always felt that in a certain sense the effect of
/the introduction does not quite represent the effect of the poem. [^ Faith, in the introduction, is too completely triumphant. I think this is inevitable, because so far as the thought-debate presented by the poem is summed up, it must be summed up on the side of Faith. Faith must give the last word : but the last word is not the whole utterance of the truth : the whole truth is that assurance and doubt must alternate in the moral world in which we at present live, somewhat as night and day alternate in the physical world. The revealing visions come and go ; when they come we yj?^/ that we know: but in the intervals we must pass through states in which all is dark, and in which we can only struggle to hold the conviction that
Power is with us in the night Which makes the darkness and the light And dwells not in the light alone.
" It must be remembered," writes my father, " that this is a poem, not an actual biography. It is founded on our friendship, on the engagement of Arthur Hallam to my sister, on his sudden death at Vienna, just before the rime fixed for their marriage, and on his burial at Clevedon Church. The poem concludes with the marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia. It was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness. The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publica- tion, until I found that I had written so many. The difiFerent moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering
^ See BrowDing^s <' Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish.**
1850] DIVISIONS OF THE POEM. 3O5
will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love. * I ' is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him. After the Death of A. H. H., the divisions of the poem are made by First Xmas Eve (Section XXVIII.), Second Xmas (lxxviii.^), Third Xmas Eve (crv. and cv. etc.). I myself did not see Clevedon till years after the burial of A. H. H. Jan. 3rd, 1834, and then in later editions of * In Memoriam ' I altered the word * chancel,' which was the word used by Mr Hallam in his Memoir, to * dark church.' As to the localities in which the poems were written, some were written in Lincolnshire, some in London, Essex, Gloucestershire, Wales, anywhere where I happened to be^"
" And as for the metre of ' In Memoriam ' I had no notion till 1880 that Lord Herbert of Cherbury had
1 No. Lxxii. refers to the first anniversary of the death Sept. 15th, 1833. No. c. to the farewell of the fcunily to Somersby in 1837.
' In a letter to Mr Malan written at the same time as the above note, in reply to enquiries as to whether, in <<In Memoriam,^^ he has copied Statins, or Ovid's " Epicedion," or the " Sorrow of Arcadius Etruscus,^ or ** Spring Stanzas to Domitian," etc. etc. my father writes :
JVav, i^hy 1883. Dear Sir,
I am sorry that your letter has gone so long unanswered, but my eyes are so bad, and I have such a large correspondence that I find it impossible to answer everybody. It is news to me that the remains of. A. H. H. were landed at Dover. I had always believed that the ship which brought them put in at Bristol. As to his being buried in the chancel, Mr Hallam in a printed memoir of his son, states that it was so. * * * * I can assure you I am innocent as far as I am aware of knowing one line of Statins ; and of Ovid's *< Epicedion '' I never heard. I have searched for it in vain in a little three volume edition of Ovid which I have here, but that does not contain thb poem; nor have I ever heard of the "Sorrow of Arcadius Etruscus,'' nor of the " Spring Stanzas to Domitian.*^ The memoir of his son by Mr Hallam, to which I allude, was printed merely for private circulation : and whether he repeated the statement of the chancel burial in the published Memoir I do not know.
Yours very truly,
A. Tennyson.
T.I. 90
306 "IN MEMORIAM.' [l850
written his occasional verses in the same metre. I believed myself the originator of the metre, until after ' In Memoriam ' came out, when some one told me that Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney had used it. The following poems were omitted from * In Memoriam ' when I published, because I thought them redundant \"
The Grave (originally No. lvii.). (Unpublished^
I keep no more a lone distress. The crowd have come to see thy grave. Small thanks or credit shall I have.
But these shall see it none the less.
The happy maiden's tears are free
And she will weep and give them way; Yet one unschool'd in want will say **The dead are dead and let them be."
Another whispers sick with loss: "O let the simple slab remain! The * Mercy Jesu ' in the rain ! The 'Miserere' in the moss!"
**I love the daisy weeping dew,
I hate the trim-set plots of art!" My friend, thou speakest from the heart, But look, for these are nature too.
To A. H. H. (originally No. cviii.). {UnpubUsAed.)
Young is the grief I entertain. And ever new the tale she tells. And ever young the face that dwells
With reason cloister'd in the brain:
i<< O SorroWi wilt thou live with me^^ was added in 185 1.
I860] POEMS OMITTED FROM PUBLISHED " IN MEMORIAM." 307
Yet grief deserves a nobler name:
She spurs an imitative will ;
'Tis shame to fail so far, and still My failing shall be less my shame:
Considering what mine eyes have seen, And all the sweetness which thou wast In thy beginnings in the past,
And all the strength thou wouldst have been:
A master mind with master minds.
An orb repulsive of all hate,
A will concentric with all fate, A life four-square to all the winds.
The Victor Hours (originally No, cxxvii.).
{Unpublished.)
Are those the far-famed Victor Hours That ride to death the griefs of men? I fear not; if I fear'd them, then
Is this blind flight the winged Powers.
Behold, ye cannot bring but good, And see, ye dare not touch the truth, Nor Sorrow beauteous in her youth,
Nor Love that holds a constant mood.
Ye must be wiser than your looks. Or wise yourselves, or wisdom-led. Else this wild whisper round my head
Were idler than a flight of rooks.
Go forward! crumble down a throne. Dissolve a world, condense a star, Unsocket all the joints of war,
And fuse the peoples into one.
v
308 "IN MEMORIAM." [i860
That my father was a student of the Bible, those who have read " In Memoriam " know. He also eagerly read all notable works within his reach relating to the Bible, and traced with deep interest such fundamental truths as underlie the great religions of the world. He hoped that the Bible ^ would be more and more studied ^y all ranks of people, and expounded simply by their teachers ; for he maintained that the religion of a people
^ could never be founded on mere moral philosophy: and that it could only come home to them in the simple, noble thoughts and facts of a Scripture like ours ^
Soon after his marriage he took to reading different systems of philosophy *, yet none particularly influenced him. The result I think is shown in a more ordered arrangement of religious, metaphysical and scientific thought throughout the " Idylls " and his later works. " In Poems like * De Profundis ' and the 'Ancient Sage,' " Jowett said, "he often brings up metaphysical truths from the deepest depths." But as a rule he knew that poetry must touch on metaphysical topics rather by allusion than systematically. In the following pages I shall not give any of his subtler arguments ; but only attempt to illustrate from " In Memoriam," with some of the other poems, and from his conversation, the general
^ everyday attitude of his mind toward the highest problems that confront us. In dealing with these none was readier in the discovery of fallacies, none was more resolute in proclaiming what seemed to him realities.
His creed, he always said, he would not formulate, for people would not understand him if he did ; but he
^ He also said : '^ The Bible ought to be read, were it only for the sake of the grand English in which it is written, an education in itself. ^^
* See Nos. xxxvi., lii., lxxxiv. last stanza but one.
* Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Schlegel, Fichte, Hegel, Ferrier, were among the books added to his library.
I860] THE POEMS THE EXPRESSION OF HIS FAITH. 309
considered that his poems expressed the principles at the ^ foundation of his faith.
He thought, with Arthur Hallam, " that the essential feelings of religion subsist in the utmost diversity of forms," that " different language does not always imply different opinions, nor different opinions any difference in real faith." " It is impossible," he said, " to imagine that the Almighty will ask you, when you come before Him in the next life what your particular form of creed was : but the question will rather be, * Have you been true to yourself, and given in My Name a cup of cold water to one of these little ones?'"
"This is a terrible age of unfaith," he would say. " I hate utter unfaith, I cannot endure that men should sacrifice everything at the cold altar of what with their imperfect knowledge they choose to call truth and reason. One can easily lose all belief, through giving up the continual thought and care for spiritual things."
And again, " In this vale of Time the hills of Time often shut out the mountains of Eternity."
My father's friend, the Bishop of Ripon, writes:
With those who are impatient of all spiritual truth he had no sympathy whatever; but he had a sympathy with those who were impatient of the formal statement of truth, only because he felt that all formal statements of truth must of necessity fall below the greatness and the grandeur of the truth itself. There is a reverent impatience of forms, and there is an irreverent impatience of them. An irreverent impatience of formal dogma means impatience of all spiritual truth; but a reverent impa- tience of formal dogma may be but the expression of the feel- ing that the truth must be larger, purer, nobler than any mere human expression or definition of it With this latter attitude of mind he had sympathy, and he expressed that sympathy in song ; he could understand those who seemed
To have reach'd a purer air, Whose faith has centre everywhere, Nor cares to fix itself to form.
3IO "IN MEMORIAM." [i860
He urged men to ''cling to faith, beyond the forms of faith \" But while he did this he also recognised clearly the importance and the value of definitions of truth, and his counsel to the very man who prided himself upon his emancipation from forms was :
Leave thou thy sister when she prays, Her early Heaven, her happy views; Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
Her faith thro' form is pure as thine. Her hands are quicker unto good: Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine'!
He warned the man proud of his emancipation from formal faith, that in a world of so many confusions he might meet with ruin, " Ev'n for want of such a type." And we are not sur- prised, knowing how insidious are the evil influences which gather round us :
Hold thou the good; define it well. For fear Divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the lords of Hell.
And thus he had sympathy with those who feel that faith is larger and nobler than form, and at the same time he had ten- derness and appreciation for those who find their faith helped by form. To him, as to so many, truth is so infinitely great that all we can do with our poor human utterances is to try and clothe it in such language as will make it clear to ourselves*
^ Cf. Vol. II. chap. XXIII. 1st paragraph.
* Jowett wrote about my fether^s << defence of honest doubt ^ as compared with this passage : ^ Can we find any reconciliation of these varying utter- ances of the same mind? I think that we may. For we may argue that truth kept back is the greatest source of doubt and suspicion: that fidth cannot survive without enquiry, and that the doubt which is raised may be the step upward to a higher fiaith. And so we arrive at the condosion that truth is good, and to be received thankfully and fearlessly by all who aie capable of receiving it. But on the other hand it is not alwajrs to be imparted in its entirety to those who cannot understand it, and whose minds would be puzzled and overwhelmed by it.^*
1850] "faith beyond THE FORMS OF FAITH." 3 II
and clear to those to whom God sends us with a message, but meanwhile, above us and our thoughts — above our broken lights — God in His mercy, God in His love, God in His infinite nature is greater than all.
Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistently emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths ; in an Omnipotent, Omni- present and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himself through the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in the freedom of the human will; and in the immortality of the soul. But he asserted that " Nothing worthy proving can be proven," and that even as to the great laws which are the basis of Science, " We have but faith, we cannot know." He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of God. " I dare hardly name His Name" he would say, and accordingly he named Him in " The Ancient Sage " the " Nameless." " But take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God," he said, " and you take away the backbone of the world." "On God and God-like men we build our trust." A week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the Personality and of the Love of God, " That God, Whose eyes consider the poor," " Who catereth even for the sparrow." " I should," he said, " infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone." He would allow that God is unknow- able in "his whole world-self, and all-in-all," and that therefore there was some force in the objection made by some people to the word " Personality," as being " anthro- pomorphic," and that perhaps "Self-consciousness" or " Mind " might be clearer to them : but at the same time he insisted that, although " man is like a thing of nought" in "the boundless plan," our highest view of God must be more or less anthropomorphic : and that
312 "IN MEMORIAM," [lb50
" Personality," as far as our intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes " Mind," " Self-conscious- ness \" " Will," " Love " and other attributes of the Real, the Supreme, " the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity Whose name is Holy."
Jowett asked him to write an anthem about God for Balliol Chapel and he wrote " The Human Cry":
We feel we are nothing — for all is Thou and in Thee ; We feel we are something — that also has come from
Thee; We know we are nothing — but Thou wilt help us to be. Hallowed be Thy name — Hallelujah I
When his last book was in proof, we spoke together of the ultimate expression of his own calm faith at the end of his life :
That Love which is and was My Father and my Brother and my God^
\ Everywhere throughout the Universe he saw the glory and greatness of God, and the science of Nature was particularly dear to him. Every new fact which came within his range was carefully weighed. As he exulted in the wilder aspects of Nature (see for instance sect. XV.) and revelled in the thunderstorm ; so he felt a joy in her orderliness ; he felt a rest in her steadfast- ness, patient progress and hopefulness ; the same seasons ever returned ; the same stars wheeled in their courses ;
^ ^ A. T. thinks it ridiculous to believe in a God and deny his con- sciousness, and was amused at someone who said of him that he had versified Hegelianism/* Jowett, MS Note.
* To enquiries as to the meaning of the words '< Immortal Love *^ in the Introduction to '< In Memoriam,^^ he explained that he had used '* Love " in the same sense as St John (i John, chap. iv.). *'The Word^^ also in No. XXXVI. was "The Word" as used by St John, the Revelation of the Eternal Thought of the Universe.
I860] HIS JOY IN NATURE. 313
the flowers^ and trees blossomed and the birds sang yearly in their appointed months; and he had a trium- phant appreciation of her ever-new revelations of beauty. One of the " In Memoriam " poems, written at Bar- mouth *, gives preeminently his sense of the joyous peace in Nature, and he would quote it in this context along with his Spring and Bird songs:
Sweet after showers, ambrosial air. That roUest from the gorgeous gloom Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare
The round of space, and rapt below Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood, And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows and blow
The fever from my cheek, and sigh The full new life that feeds thy breath Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
111 brethren, let the fancy fly
From belt to belt of crimson seas On leagues of odour streaming far, To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper " Peace V
But he was occasionally much troubled with the in- tellectual problem of the apparent profusion and waste of life and by the vast amount of sin and suffering throughout the world, for these seemed to militate against the idea of the Omnipotent and All-loving Father.
No doubt in such moments he might possibly have
^ Picking up a daisy as we walked, and looking close to its crimson-tipt leaves he said : *' Does not this look like a thinking Artificer, one who wishes to ornament ? " MS Note, E. F. G.
' He notes this in his own hand.
* See also Nos. lxxxviii., lxxxix., xci., cxv., cxvi., cxxi., cxxn.
314 "in MEMORIAM." [i860
been heard to say what I myself have heard him say : "An Omnipotent Creator Who could make such a pain- ful world is to me sometimes as hard to believe in as to believe in blind matter behind everything. The lavish profusion too in the natural world appals me, from the growths of the tropical forest to the capacity of man to multiply, the torrent of babies."
" I can almost understand some of the Gnostic here- sies, which only after all put the difficulty one step further back":
0 me I for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would, Till the High God behold it from beyond And enter it, and make it beautiful?*
After one of these moods in the summer of 1892 he exclaimed : " Yet God is love, transcendent, all- pervading I We do not get this faith from Nature or the world. If we look at Nature alone, full of perfection and imperfection, she tells us that God is disease, murder and rapine. We get this faith from ourselves, from what is highest within us, which recognizes that there is not one fruitless pang, just as there is not one lost good."
That which we dare invoke to bless;
Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without; The Power in darkness whom we guess;
1 found Him not in world or sun. Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; Nor thro' the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun:
^ He would sometimes put forward the old theory that *<The woirid is part of an infinite plan, incomplete because it b a part. We cannot therefore read the riddle.^
I860] THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 315
If e*er when faith had falFn asleep, I heard a voice "believe no more" And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the heart would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd " I have felt."
No, like a child in doubt and fear;
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near;
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro' nature, moulding men.
He had been reading the eighth chapter of Romans, and said that he thought that St Paul fully recognized in the sorrows of Nature and in the miseries of the world a stumbling-block to the divine idea of God, but that they are the preludes necessary as things are to the higher good^ "For myself," he said, "the world is the shadow of God," and then he referred to Jowett's commentary on this chapter:
As we turn from ourselves to the world around us, the prospect on which we cast our eyes seems to reflect the tone and colour of our own minds, and to share our joy and sorrow. To the religious mind it seems also to reflect our sins. We cannot indeed speak of the misery of the brute creation, of whose constitution we know so little ; nor do we pretend to discover in the loveliest spots of earth indications of a fallen world. But when we look at the vices and diseases of mankind, at the life of labour in which animals are our partners, at the aspect in modem
^ Cf. St John zvi. 21, 22.
31 6 "IN MEMORIAM." [i860
times of our large towns, as in ancient, of a world given to idolatry, we see enough to explain the Apostle's meaning, and to understand how he could say that " The whole creation groaneth and travaileth till now." He is not speaking, of course, of the conscious feeling of degradation, but of the world, as it seemed to the eye of faith ; not as it appeared to itself, but as we may imagine it to appear in the sight of God when compared with the divine idea.... But the Spirit helps us, and God has chosen us according to his purpose, and in all things God is working with us for good \
My father invariably believed that humility* is the only true attitude of the human soul, and therefore spoke with the greatest reserve of what he called " these unfathomable mysteries," as befitting one who did not ; dogmatise, but who knew that the Finite can by no means grasp the Infinite : " Dark is the world to thee *, thyself is the reason why " ; and yet, he had a profound trust that when all is seen face to face, all will be seen as the best. " Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great," "Who knows whether Revelation be not itself a veil to hide the Glory of that Love which we could not look upon, without marring the sight and our onward progress ? "
This faith was to him the breath of life, and never, I feel, really failed him, or life itself would have failed.
Free-will and its relation to the meaning of human life and to circumstance was latterly one of his most common subjects of conversation. Free-will was un- * doubtedly, he said, the ** main miracle, apparently an act of self-limitation by the Infinite, and yet a revelation by
^ Jowett, Epistle to the Romans.
^ ^ Almost the finest summing up of Religion is ' to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.*^* A. T.
He often quoted Newton^s saying that we are like children picking up pebbles on the shore of the Infinite Ocean.
• The real mysteries to him were Time, life, and " finite-infinite " space : and so he talks of the soul '^ being bom and banishM into mystery."
I860] LAW AND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 317
Himself of Himself." "Take away the sense of indi- vidual responsibility and men sink into pessimism and madness." He wrote at the end of the poem " Despair ": " In my boyhood I came across the Calvinist Creed, and assuredly however unfathomable the mystery, if one cannot believe in the freedom of the human will as of the Divine, life is hardly worth having." The lines that he oftenest repeated about Free-will were.
This main miracle that thou art thou With power on thine own act and on the world.
Then he would enlarge upon man's consequent moral obligations, upon the Law which claims a free obedience, and upon the pursuit of moral perfection (in imitation of the Divine) to which man is called.
ov yap €)((o lycjrye ovhkp ovrco /loi Ivapyk^ ov, 019 rovroy TO etvoL a>5 oiov T€ /xaXtora icaXw t€ koX ayadov.
" For I hold nothing so clear as this, that I must be as good and noble as a man can be."
I cannot refrain from setting down the drift of his talk to a young man who was going to the University. — " If a man is merely to be a bundle of sensations, he had better not exist at all. He should embark on his career in the spirit of selfless and adventurous heroism; should develop his true self by not shirking responsibility, by casting aside all maudlin and intro- spective morbidities, and by using his powers cheerfully in accordance with the obvious dictates of his moral consciousness, and so, as far as possible, in harmony with what he feels to be the Absolute Right.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncalled for) but to live by law.
3l8 ''IN IfElfORIAM." [i860
Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
It is motive, it is the great purpose which consecrates life \ The real test of a man is not what he knows, but what he is in himself and in his relation to others. For instance, can he battle against his own bad inherited instincts, or brave public opinion in the cause of truth? The love of God is the true basis of duty, truth, reverence, loyalty, love, virtue and work. I believe in these al- though I feel the emptiness and hollowness of much of life. • Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect' " Then he added characteristically : " But don't be a prig. Most young men with anything in them make fools of themselves at some time or other."
One of the last passages I heard him recite about Free-will was :
But ill for him who, bettering not with time.
Corrupts the strength of Heaven-descended Will,
And ever weaker grows thro' acted crime,
Or seeming-genial venial fault.
Recurring and suggesting still!
He seems as one whose footsteps halt,
Toiling in immeasurable sand.
And o'er a weary sultry land.
Far beneath a blazing vault.
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.
And he wrote for me as to man's will being free but only within certain limits : " Man's Free-will is but a bird in a cage; he can stop at the lower perch, or he can
^ St Paul's expression << The temple of the Holy Ghost ^ he thought had had a powerfiil effect on the Christian appreciation of the meaning of life.
I860] HIS LONGING FOR THE DIVINE. 319
mount to a higher. Then that which is and knows will enlarge his cage, give him a higher and a higher perch, and at last break ofiF the top of his cage, and let him out to be one with the Free-will of the Universe." Then he said earnestly : " If the absorption into the divine in the after-life be the creed of some, let them at all events allow us many existences of individuality before this absorption ; since this short-lived individuality seems to be but too short a preparation for so mighty a unions
Death's truer name Is "Onward," no discordance in the roll And march of that Eternal Harmony Whereto the worlds beat time.
In the same way, " O living will that shalt endure " he explained as that which we know as Free-will, the higher and enduring" part of man. He held that there w^ an intimate connexion between the human and the divine, and that each individual will had a spiritual and eternal significance with relation to other individual wills as well as to the Supreme and Eternal Will.
Throughout his life he had a constant feeling of a spiritual harmony existing between ourselves and the outward visible Universe, and of the actual Immanence of God in the infinitesimal atom as in the vastest system*. " If God," he would say, " were to withdraw Himself for one single instant from this Universe, everything would vanish into nothingness." When speaking on that sub- ject he said to me: "My most passionate desire is to
1 " In Memoriam," No. XLvn.
' He would point out the difficulties of materialism, and would propound to us, when we were boys, the old puzzle : " Look at the mystery of a grain of sand; you can divide it for ever and for ever. You cannot conceive anything material of which you cannot conceive the half/^ He disliked the Atomic theory : and was taken by the theory of abartginal cenins of forci.
320 "in memoriam/' [iS50
have a clearer and fuller vision of God The soul seems to me one with God, how I cannot telL I can sym- pathize with God in my poor little way." In some phases of thought and feeling his jdealism tended more decidedly to mysticism. He wrote : "A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life *." " This might," he said, " be the state which St Paul describes, * Whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell.' "
He continued : " I am ashamed of my feeble de- scription. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words? Hut in a moment, when I come back to my normal state of * sanity,' I am ready to fight for tnein iiebes Ichy and hold that it will last for aeons of aeons."
In the same way he said that there might be a more intimate communion than we could dream of between the living and the dead, at all events for a time.
May all love, His love, unseen but felt, o'ershadow Thee^ Till Gods love set Thee at his side again I
^Cf. '^The Ancient Sage*"" and the smaller partial anticipation in '*Ia Memoriam.^ xo\ st. 9.
•*Vet it ap(>cared that he distinguished himself from external ddnp.*
lowett. MS Nv^te.
1850] "going on and STILL TO BE." 32 1
And —
The ghost in Man, the ghost that once was Man, But cannot wholly free itself from Man, Are calling to each other through a dawn Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil Is rending, and the Voices of the day Are heard across the Voices of the dark.
I need not enlarge upon his faith in the Immortality of the Soul as he has dwelt upon that so fully in his poems ^ " I can hardly understand," he said, " how any great, imaginative man, who has deeply lived, suflfered. thought and wrought, can doubt of the Soul's continu- ous progress in the after-life." His poem of " Wages " he liked to quote on this subject.
He more than once said what he has expressed in " Vastness " : " Hast Thou made all this for naught ! Is all this trouble of life worth undergoing if we only end in our own corpse-coffins at last ? If you allow a God; and God allows this strong instinct and universal yearn- ing for another life, surely that is in a measure a pre- sumption of its truth. We cannot give up the mighty hopes that make us men."
My own dim life should teach me this. That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core.
And dust and ashes all that is.
What then were God to such as I?
I have heard him even say that he " would rather know that he was to be lost eternally than not know that the whole human race was to live eternally " ; and when he speaks of " faintly trusting the larger hope " he means by " the larger hope " that the whole human race would
^ He said to Bishop Lightfoot : ^ The cardinal point of Christianity is the Life after Death ^ (2 Tim. chap. i.).
T. L «^
% <•
322 ''IN MEMORIAM." [iSIjO
through, perhaps, ages of suflfering, be at length purified and saved, even those who now " better not with time " ; so that at the end of " The Vision of Sin " we read
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
One day towards the end of his life he bade me look into the Revised Version and see how the Revisers had translated the passage " Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." His disappointment was keen when he found that the translators had not altered " everlast- ing " into " aeonian ^ " or some such word : for he never would believe that Christ could preach "everlasting punishment."
" Fecemi la divina potestate La somma sapienza, e '1 primo amore,"
were words which he was fond of quoting in this rela- tion, as if they were a kind of unconscious confession by Dante that Love must conquer at the last.
Letters were not unfrequently addressed to him asking what his opinions were about Evolution, about Prayer, and about Christ.
Of Evolution he said : " That makes no difference to me, even if the Darwinians did not, as they do, exag- gerate Darwinism. To God all is present. He sees present, past, and future as one."
To your question now Which touches on the workman and his work. " Let there be light and there was light " : 'tis so : For was and is and will be are but is: And all creation is one act at once, The birth of light; but we that are not all. As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that. And live perforce from thought to thought, and make The act a phantom of succession: there Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time.
1 " Eternal" in R. v.
I860] "THE HEIGHT THAT IS HIGHER." 323
In the poem "By an Evolutionist," written in 1888 when he was dangerously ill, he defined his position ; he conceived that the further science progressed, the more the Unity of Nature, and the purpose hidden behind the cosmic process of matter in motion and changing forms of life, would be apparent. Someone asked him whether it was not hard to account for genius by Evolution. He put aside the question, for he believed that genius was the greatest mystery to itself \
To Tyndall he once said, " No evolutionist is able to explain the mind of Man or how any possible physio- logical change of tissue can produce conscious thought *." Yet he was inclined to think that the theory of Evo- lution caused the world to regard more clearly the " Life of Nature as a lower stage in the manifestation of a principle which is more fully manifested in the spiritual life of man, with the idea that in this process of Evolution the lower is to be regarded as a means to the higher »."
1 « Peopie,^^ he once said, ^ do not consider that every human being is a vanfiil of human beings, of those who have gone before him, and of those who form part of his life.^^
' Cf. Tyndall^s Scientific Materialism : '* But the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding fects of consciousness is unthinkable, granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why."
' In a letter from the present Master of Balliol to me.
And in '' In Memoriam '^ he had written thus :
They say. The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began.
And grew to seeming-random forms.
The seeming prey of cyclic storms. Till at the last arose the man;
Who throve and branch^ from clime to clime The herakl of a higher race,
21 — 2
324 "in MEMORIAM." [i860
In " Maud " he spoke of the making of man :
As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for
his birth, So many a million of ages have gone to the making
of man : He now is first, but is he the last ?
The answer he would give to this query was : " No, mankind is as yet on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder \ although every man has and has had from everlasting his true and perfect being in the Divine Consciousness."
About prayer he said: " The reason why men find it hard to regard prayer in the same light in which it was formerly regarded is, that we seem to know more of the unchangeableness of Law: but I believe that God reveals Himself in each individual soul. Prayer is, to take a mundane simile, like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide."
" Prayer on our part is the highest aspiration of the soul."
And of himself in higher place, If so he type this work of time
Within himself, from more to more; Or, crownM with attributes of woe Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not an idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batterM with the shocks of doom
To shape and use. Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast.
And let the ape and tiger die.
1 « The herald of a higher race.^
1850] PRAYER. 325
A breath that fleets beyond this iron world And touches Him who made it.
And
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with
Spirit can meet — Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands
and feet
And
More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of.
He said that "O Thou Infinite, Amen," was the form of prayer which he himself used in the time of trouble and sorrow: and that it was better to suflFer than to lose the power of suffering.
When questions were written to him about Christ, he would say to me : "Answer for me that I have given my belief in * In Memoriam ^.' "
As the Master of Balliol wrote:
The " In Memoriam " records most of his inner nature. It was the higher and prevailing temper of his mind. He used to regard it as having said what he had to say on religion.
The main testimony to Christianity he found not in miracles but in that eternal witness, the revelation of what might be called "The Mind of God," in the Christian morality, and its correlation with the divine in man.
He had a measureless admiration for the Sermon on the Mount ; and for the Parables — " perfection, beyond compare," he called them. I heard a talk on these be- tween him and Browning, and Browning fully agreed with my father in his admiration. Moreover my father expressed his conviction that " Christianity with its divine Morality
1 "In Memorianii^ xxxvi.
326 "IN MEMORIAM." [i860
but without the central figure of Christ, the Son of Man, would become cold S and that it is fatal for religion to lose its warmth *' ; that " The Son of Man " was the most tremendous title possible; that the forms of Christian religion would alter ; but that the spirit of Christ would still grow from more to more " in the roll of the ages."
Till each man find his own in all men's good, And all men work in noble brotherhood.
" This is one of my meanings," he said, " of
Ring in the Christ that is to be:
when Christianity without bigotry will triumph, when the controversies of creeds shall have vanished, and
Shall bear false witness, each of each, no more. But find their limits by that larger light, And overstep them, moving easily Thro' after-ages in the Love of Truth, The truth of LoveV
" The most pathetic utterance in all history," he said, ** is that of Christ on the Cross, * It is finished,' after that passionate cry, ' My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'" Nevertheless he also recognized the note of triumph in " It is finish 'd *." " I am always amazed when I read the New Testament at the splen- dour of Christ's purity and holiness and at His infinite pity*." He disliked discussion on the Nature of Christ, "seeing that such discussion was mostly unprofitable, for none knoweth the Son but the Father." " He went about doing good " he would say : and one of the
^ ^ He did not preach His opinions ; He preached Himself." Renan^s VU di Jisus. <'The spiritual character of Christ," my father would say, ^is more wonderful than the greatest miracle."
***Akbar's Dream."
* See The Death of (Enoney and other PoemSy p. 80. Westcott writes : <^I always think that the tense fyicarcViircs marks the crisis as past."
* What he called <<the man-woman ^ in Christ, the union of tenderness and strength.
1850] "better than ANY MONUMENT." 327
traditional and unwritten sayings of Christ which oftenest came home to him was, " He that is near Me is near the fire," the baptism of the fire of inspiration. For in " In Memoriam " the soul, after grappling with anguish and darkness, doubt and death, emerges with the inspiration of a strong and steadfast faith in the Love of God for man, and in the oneness of man with God, and of man with man in Him —
That God, which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element. And one far-ofif divine event.
To which the whole creation moves.
I cannot end this chapter on " In Memoriam " more fitly than by quoting Henry Hallam's letter on receiving in 1850 what he calls " the precious book."
I know not how to express what I have felt. My first sentiment was surprise, for, though I now find that you had mentioned the intention to my daughter, Julia, she had never told me of the poems. I do not speak as another would to praise and admire: few of them indeed I have as yet been capable of reading, the g^ef they express is too much akin to that they revive. It is better than any monument which could be raised to the memory of my beloved son, it is a more lively and enduring testimony to his great virtues and talents that the world should know the friendship which existed between you,, that posterity should associate his name with that of Alfred Tennyson.
CHAPTER XV.
MARRIAGE (1850-51). Like perfect music onto noble words.
My father and mother had met in the spring of 1850 at Shiplake on the Thames ; where they had both stayed with the Rawnsleys, Mrs Rawnsley being my mother's cousin.
If "In Memoriam" were published, Moxon had promised a small yearly royalty on this and on the other poems, and so my father had decided that he could now honourably oflfer my mother a home.
Accordingly after ten years of separation their en- gagement was renewed.
Early in those ten years my grandmother had sug- gested dividing her jointure with them, so that they might marry, but this, of course, they could not allow. Moxon now advanced ;^300 — so my Uncle Charles told a friend, — at all events ;^300 were in my father's bank in his name ; and with this and their united small in- comes, and all household furniture given them by my mother's father, they decided that they could brave life together and that the marriage should take place at Shiplake on the 1 3th of June, the month which saw the publication of " In Memoriam."
328
I860] THE WEDDING IN SHIPLAKE CHURCH. 329
Of the Vicarage with its terraced garden, and of the fine old church Miss Mitford gives the following picturesque description :
A few miles further, and a tiun to the right conducts us to one of the grand old village churches, which give so much of character to English landscape. A large and beautiful pile it is. The tower, half clothed with ivy, stands with its charming vicarage and its pretty vicarage-garden on a high eminence, overhanging one of the finest bends of the great river. A woody lane leads from the church to the bottom of the chalk-cliff, one side of which stands out from the road below, like a promontory, surmounted by the laurel hedges and flowery cedar of Lebanon. This is Shiplake church, famed far and near for its magnificent oak carving, and the rich painted glass of its windows, collected, long before such adornments were fashionable, by the fine taste of the late vicar, and therefore filled with the very choicest specimens of mediaeval art, chiefly obtained from the remains of the celebrated Abbey of St Bertin near St Omer, sacked during the first French Revolution. In this church Alfred Tennyson was married.
The wedding was of the quietest (even the cake and dresses arriving too late), which made my father say, to the amusement of those who were present, that it was " the nicest wedding " he had ever been at. In after-life he said : ** The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her."
The marriage party consisted of the bride's father \ Henry Sellwood, Edmund and Cecilia Lushington, Charles Weld, husband of Anne, one of the Sellwood sisters, and Mr Greville Phillimore. The two child bridesmaids were Mary and Margaret Rawnsley.
^ He was a stately, courteous gentleman, kindly, cultivated, unaffected, and above all a good friend. His family had come in old days from Somersetshire into Berkshire. He himself was a solicitor at Homcastle. Greatly to his honour he had taken up this profession when his family was on the road to ruin. In 181 2 he had married Sarah Franklin, sister of the '^ heroic sailor ^^ Sir John Franklin, but she had died in 1816, aged 28, leaving three daughters, Emily, Anne, and Louisa.
330 MARRIAGE. [i860
My uncle Charles and Louisa Tennyson Turner could not join the party, and my uncle wrote accordingly :
Oh what a queer world it is I I hope however it has done k brace of amiable and remarkable people some genuine good, whirligig as it is — this time at least Weill The thing is to come off on the 13th, daddy says. Good wishes in crowds from me. I despatch a dove's wing to you. I am going to keep pigeons, would they were carrier pigeons ! then would I trouble their wings with missives of congratulation to arrive more swiftly than the railroad.
Coo I coo I coo I Your affectionate brother,
Charles.
My father made and repeated the following poem, as my mother and he drove from Shiplake to Pangbourne; enclosing it to Drummond Rawnsley through Mrs Rawnsley.
My dear Kate,
You managed it all very well yesterday.
Many thanks.
Ever yours, A. T.
P.S. Dubbie's ^ fees must be come at as he can best manage. The clerk and shirts are owing.
The poem would be more perfect without the third stanza, but I do not think you would like to miss it.
To the Vicar of Shiplake. {Unpublished.)
Vicar of this pleasant spot
Where it was my chance to marry, Happy, happy be your lot
In the Vicarage by the quarry. You were he that knit the knot!
^ Short for Drummond.
lit,,,, ie,ji.rt,ruia/(Uj„,-Hi:.f.„,i,jiy(/.:/:(i\i„':fi,4.
1850] MY MOTHER. 33 1
Sweetly, smoothly flow your life. Never tithe unpaid perplex you,
Parish feud, or party strife,
All things please you, nothing vex you,
You have given me such a wife!
Live and prosper! Day by day Watch your standard roses blowing.
And your three young things at play, And your triple terrace growing
Green and greener every May!
Sweetly flow your life with Kate's, Glancing ofif from all things evil.
Smooth as Thames below your gates, Thames along the silent level.
Streaming thro' his osier'd aits!
And let me say here — although, as a son, I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and " very woman of very woman," — " such a wife " and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my father's adviser in literary matters ; " I am proud of her intellect," he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at ; she transcribed his poems : to her and to no one else he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her " tender, spiritual nature \" and instinctive no- bility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by " her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven," she helped him also to the utmost in the hours
^ My &ther*8 words.
332 MARRIAGE. [l850
ci his depression and of his sorrow ; and to her he wrote two of the most beautiful erf his shorter lyrics, " Dear, near and true," and the dedicatory lines which prefaced his last volume, TAr Death of CEnane.
The day after the wedding they went to Weston- super-Mare, on their way to Clevedon. ** It seemed a kind of consecration to go there," They saw Arthur Hallam's resting-place, and were received by Sir Abra- ham Elton in the beautiful old Manor House, Clevedon Court ; and thence they went to Lynton. In that coun- try, more solitary then than now, they enjoyed long rambles through the woods and over the heather and rode to the Valley of Rocks and Exmoor, in spite of " the weeping Devonshire climate"
Glastonbury, one of the reputed " island valleys of Avilion," followed : where they lunched in what had been the Refectory of the old Hospital for Pilgrims, built by an Abbot, John de Selwode, of the same name and race as my mother. This Abbot alone, as they were told, is buried beside the tomb of King Arthur, in the chancel of that famous Abbey, — once the wonder of the world, now but a few ruins in a garden. My father was greatly interested by the legend that Joseph of Arima- thea came there in 63 a.d, and founded the first Chris- tian colony in England :
From our old books I know That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury, And there the heathen Prince, Arviragus, Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build ; And there he built with wattles from the marsh A little lonely church in days of yore.
Clifton was the next halting-place ; thence they went to Bath, and on to Cheltenham to visit his mother. Many honeymoon houses were oflfered ; among others Brancepeth by his cousins, Fryston by R. M. Milnes,
I860] CONISTON. 333
Tent Lodge, Coniston, by Mrs James Marshall, a sister of my father's college friend, Stephen Spring Rice. They selected Tent Lodge, and set ofif for Patterdale and UUswater, then to "the little villa on Coniston water." On their arrival my father writes to Mrs Russell :
Dearest Aunt,
Have you yet received the bound copy of "In Memoriam" which I purposed for you? If not, will you or Emma drop me a line to this place, and I will take care that you have it immediately ? We have been making a little tour about these lakes, and have spent the last few days with my friends the Speddings at Bassenthwaite Water. We only arrived here last night. Mr Marshall's park looked as lovely as the Garden of Eden, as we descended the hill to this place. We have a very beautiful view from our drawing-room windows, crag, mountain, woods and lake, which look especially fine as the sun is dropping behind the hills. I wish you could see it. The Marshalls themselves are not here but expected daily. We found the seat of a Marshall on almost every lake we came to, for it seems there are several brothers who have all either bought or been left estates in this country ; and they are all, report says, as wealthy as Croesus. I send you this little note just to tell you where we are, and how much your bounty has enabled us to enjoy ourselves among the mountains. We have been on the whole fortunate in weather, tho' this climate has a bad name. I do not know whether you are at Cheltenham or Burwarton, but wherever you are, dearest aunt, God bless and preserve you from all ill. My wife desires her kindest love to you. Good-bye.
Ever yours affectionately, A. Tennyson.
334 MARRIAGE. [i860
The drives and walks over the mountains, the boating on the lake among the water-lilies and by the islands where the herons built, he rowing, she steering, are noted in their diary.
Here for the first time my mother saw Carlyle, who was staying with the Marshalls. The meeting was characteristic ; he slowly scanned her from head to foot, then gave her a hearty shake of the hand. Next day he called at Tent Lodge ; and, hearing her cough, " with his invariable kindness" stole round, while the others were talking, and shut the window which was open be- hind her\
One evening Mr Venables and Mr de Vere called. They talked for about an hour with my father — my mother having already retired to rest. At last, after puffing at his pipe for some moments in silence, my father spoke " like one thinking aloud " : "I have known many women who were excellent, one in one way, another in another way, but this woman is the noblest woman I have ever known*." As Aubrey de Vere writes to me : " No friend who had then heard him could have felt any further anxiety as to his domestic happiness."
The Marshalls offered my father and mother Tent Lodge as a permanent home, and the Ashburtons a house near Croydon, but these kind offers they thought it best to decline and went for a time to Park House, to find a residence of their own.
On November 19th my father was appointed Poet
Laureate, owing chiefly to Prince Albert's admiration
"^ for " In Memoriam." Wordsworth had been now dead
^ Another story of his concern for others my Either would tell. ** Having heard that Henry Taylor was ill, Carlyle rushed off from London to Sheen with a bottle of medicine, which had done Mrs Carlyle good, without in the least knowing what was ailing Henry Taylor, or for what the medicine was useful."
« MS, Aubrey de Vere.
i860] THE LAUREATESHIP. 335
some months; and my father, as he has assured me, had not any expectation of the Laureateship, or any thought upon the subject : it seemed to him therefore a very curious coincidence, that the night before the offer reached him he dreamt that Prince Albert came and kissed him on the cheek, and that he said in his dream, " Very kind, but very German."
In the morning this letter about the Laureateship was brought to his bedroom :
Windsor Castle, Nov. $/h, 1850.
By the death of the late lamented Wm. Wordsworth the Office of Poet Laureate to the Queen became at Her Majesty's disposal.
The ancient duties of this Office, which consisted in laudatory Odes to the Sovereign, have been long, as you are probably aware, in abeyance, and have never been called for during the Reign of Her present Majesty. The Queen however has been anxious that the Office should be maintained ; first on accoimt of its antiquity, and secondly because it establishes a connection, through Her Household, between Her Majesty and the poets of this country as a body.
To make however the continuance of this Office in harmony with public opinion, the Queen feels that it is necessary that it should be limited to a name bearing such distinction in the literary world as to do credit to the appointment, and it was under this feeling, that Her Majesty in the first instance olEfered the appointment to Mr Rogers, who stated to Her Majesty, in his reply, that the only reason which compelled him gratefully to decline Her Majesty's gjracious intention, was, that his great age rendered him unfit to receive any new office.
It is under the same desire that the name of the poet appointed should adorn the Office, that I have received the commands of the Queen to offer this post to you, as a mark of Her Majesty's appreciation of your literary distinction.
I have the honour to be. Sir,
Your obedient humble servant,
C. B. Pfflpps.
336 MARRIAGE. [i860
He took the whole day to consider and at the last wrote two letters, one accepting, one refusing, and deter- mined to make up his mind after a consultation with his friends at dinner. He would joke and say, " In the end I accepted the honour, because during dinner Venables told me, that, if I became Poet Laureate, I should always when I dined out be offered the liver-wing of a fowl."
After accepting the Laureateship he writes to the Rev. H. Rawnsley : .
My dear Rawnsley,
You do ill to seem as though you blamed me for forgetf ulness of you and yours ; you know it is not so, and can never be so, but I confess that in the matter of letter-writing I am in arrear to everybody. I have dozens of letters to write this afternoon, and I cannot help wishing that I could hire the electric telegraph once a month, and so work ofif my scores with the wires at whatever expense. This old-world, slow pen and ink operation is behind the age. I thank you for your congratulations touching the Laureateship. I was advised by my friends not to decline it * * *. I have no passion for courts, but a great love of privacy. It is, I believe, scarce ;^ioo a year, and my friend R. M. Milnes tells me that the price of the patent and court dress will swallow up all the first year's income. I have mislaid your letter, and so cannot tell whether you asked me any questions. Let me ask you one. I have been looking out for an unfurnished house, with good rooms, for £to a year or thereabouts : do you know of any such near you ? If you do, please communicate with me and I will come and see it. I expect an heir to nothing about next March or April. I suppose I must lay by the Laureate's hire for him as Southey did. Pray give
1850] FIRST HOME IN SUSSEX. 337
my kindest love to Mrs R. and my best remembrances to all friends, particularly G. Coltman, and
Believe me yours affectionately,
A, Tennyson.
The immediate result of becoming Poet Laureate was that poems and letters poured in, and my father writes : " I get such shoals of poems that I am almost crazed with them; the two hundred million poets of Great Britain deluge me daily with poems : truly the Laureateship is no sinecure. If any good soul would just by way of a diversion send me a tome of prose ! " In answer to an appeal from Moxon for a fresh volume of new poems, he said, "We are correcting all the volumes for new editions ^"
My parents' first venture in the choice of a home was not encouraging. The house that they took was at Warninglid in Sussex, pleasant and sunny, with large airy rooms from which there was a Copley-Fielding- like view of the South Downs. " The full song of the birds delighted us as we drove up to the door," and the home seemed at first in every way suitable. But one night soon after their arrival a tremendous storm blew down part of the wall in their bedroom, and through the gap the wind raved and the water rushed. Then they learnt that their dining-room and bedroom had been a Romani Catholic Chapel, that a baby was buried somewhere on the premises, and later that one of a notorious gang of thieves and murderers known as " The Cuckfield Gang" had lived in their very lodge.
Besides they discovered that no postman came near
^ In the Keepsake for 1851 were published :
What time I wasted youthful hours, and
Come not when I am dead.
This last poem, << Edwin Morris,^ <'The Eagle,^ and the Dedication << To the Queen,*^ were included in the Poems ^ seventh edition, 1851.
T. L "w^
338 MARRIAGE. [l851
the house, that the nearest doctor and butcher lived at Horsham, seven miles ofif ; and that there was not even a carrier who passed anywhere within hail. Altogether everything was so uncanny and so uncomfortable, that they took a speedy departure, my father drawing my mother in a Bath chair over a very rough road to Cuckfield.
Finally, by the kind aid of Mrs Henry Taylor, they took up their abode at Chapel House, Montpelier Row, Twickenham; a house which overlooked the parks of General Peel and of the Due d'Aumale. It was entered through a square hall, and on the fine old staircase stood the carved figure of a mitred bishop "as if to bless the passers by."
On the 2ist February their diary says: "We read Alton Locke, drove about in search of a Court dress for Lev€e, could not find one and had to give up Levee on the 26th. Rogers, hearing of this, ofifer'd his own dress, which had been also worn by Wordsworth and had been promised to the Wordsworth family as an heirloom. The coat did well enough, but about other parts of the dress there was some anxiety felt for the Lev€e on March 6th, as they had not been tried on."
He was meditating his first Laureate poem, " To the Queen," and was especially thinking of a stanza in which " the empire of Wordsworth should be asserted : for he was a representative Poet Laureate, such a poet as kings should honour, and such an one as would do honour to kings; — making the period of a reign famous by the utterance of memorable words concerning that period." Spedding wrote to my father : " Those potentates stand highest in the estimation of succeeding ages, not who have been best praised in their own time, but who have in their own time done honour and given aid and en- couragement to that which remains great and memorable in all time."
186l] MACREADY, 339
Later in March he stayed at Sir Alexander DufiF Gordon's ; and whilst there, at an evening party given by Lord John Russell, was introduced to Bunsen and to the Duke of Argyll. The Duke in after days and to the end of my father's life was one of his most valued friends.
On April 5th he received from Mr Macready a letter of thanks for the sonnet addressed to him on leaving the stage.
Farewell, Macready, since to-night we part; Full-handed thunders often have confessed Thy power, well used to move the public breast.
We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.
Farewell, Macready, since this night we part.
Go, take thine honours home ; rank with the best,* Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest.
Who made a nation purer thro' their art.
Thine is it that our drama did not die.
Nor flicker down to brainless pantomime.
And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see. Farewell, Macready; moral, grave, sublime;
Our Shakespeare's bland and universal eye
Dwells pleased, thro' twice a hundred years, on thee.
From W. C. Macready.
Sherborne, Dorset, April ^th, 1851.
My dear Mr Tennyson,
If I had obeyed the impulse of my feelings, I should have written to you long since, when our friend Forster first communicated to me the kindness you had shown me in honour- ing my name with the glory of your verse. This was some days before the publication of your lines, and he may have told you that the emotion they excited in me was a manifestation of my grateful appreciation beyond what words can render you.
340 MARRIAGE. [l851
You have indeed embalmed my perishable name, which will not so soon be lost in the long night, as " carens vate sacro," and I may truly assure you, of no testimony have I felt more proud, and on none have I reflected with more grateful pleasure, than on that which bears your name.
I remain, dear Mr Tennyson,
Always and sincerely yours,
W. C. Macready.
On the 2oth of April my parents' first child, a boy, was born, and, owing to my mother's having fallen down a step, died in the birth. At the time my father wrote :
" It was Easter Sunday and at his birth I heard the great roll of the organ, of the uplifted psalm (in the Chapel adjoining the house).... Dead as he was I felt proud of him. To-day when I write this down, the remembrance of it rather overcomes me ; but I am glad that I have seen him, dear little nameless one that hast lived tho' thou hast never breathed, I, thy father, love thee and weep over thee, tho' thou hast no place in the
Universe. Who knows? It may be that thou hast
God's Will be done."
In the summer they met the Carlyles again. About this time he described my father to Sir J. Simeon as " sitting on a dung-heap among innumerable dead dogs." Carlyle meant that he was apt to brood over old-world subjects for his poems. Once many years after, when we called upon him, my father teazed him about this utterance, and Carlyle replied, " Eh ! that was not a very luminous description of you."
This was the year of the first great Exhibition, and what seems to have most delighted my father was the building itself and the great glass fountain.
On July 15th they left for Boulogne on their way to Italy. "The Daisy" gives the journey better than any prose of mine can give it. Jowett writes, " He
186l] FLORENCE AND THE BROWNINGS. 34 1
always had a living vision of Italy, Greece and the Mediterranean." He was proud of the metre of " The Daisy " which he called a far-oflE echo of the Horatian Alcaic \ Among the many metres he invented, this he ranked among his best, together with some of the anapaestic movements in " Maud," and the long-rolling rhythm of his " Ode to Virgil." On their journey he took with him his usual travelling companions, Shake- speare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Horace, Pindar, Theocri- tus, and probably the Divina Commedia and Goethe's Gedichte.
Italy was in such a disturbed state that they did not go to Rome as they had intended. The fever was prevalent in Venice, so this had also to be given up. They stayed three weeks at the Baths of Lucca in the house of one Giorgio Basantino, opposite a wood where they would sit watching the green lizards at play. There were delightful evening drives over the mountains ; and they rejoiced in "the glorious violet colouring of the Apennines, and the picturesqueness of the peasants beat- ing out their flax or spinning with their distaffs at their cottage doors." Thence they journeyed to Florence to stay with my uncle Frederick at the Villa Torregiani, which had been for many years his home. On September 24th they left Florence, returning by way of the "snowy Spliigen" to Paris. Here the Brownings called on them at their hotel. Mr Browning, already my father's friend, was affectionate as ever. Mrs Browning was "fragile-look- ing, with great spirit eyes," and met my mother "as if she had been her own sister." Savile Morton came too, and the diary says: " His wild laugh sounded through the corridors. The Brownings gave us, before parting, two beautiful Paris nosegays (the flowers arranged in a sort of Grecian
^ He was pleased with the slightly different effect of (substantially) the same metre in the invitation ^ To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,^ gained by the dactyl which in those verses begins each fourth line (see p. 429).
342 MARRIAGE. [l862
pattern) and both alike." On their return home to Chapel House, my father quotes Catullus as he enters
the door :
''O, quid solutis est beatius ciuis!
Cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
Lahore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum,
Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto.
Hoc est, quod unum est pro laboribus tantis!
»
Soon after he wrote the following letter to his old friends Mr and Mrs Brookfield, who were on their way to Madeira:
My dear William and Jane,
I have only just got back to England and
heard of you in calling on Mrs Taylor at Mortlake.
Grieved I was to hear so ill an account, that you are
forced to leave England and that I may not see you
again for a long time ; yet I do not know why I should
write except to tell you that my sympathies go with
you and to wish that you, William, may soon be better
and that God's blessing may be with you on the winter
seas, and in the fair island which I have so often longed
to see. If my wife could stand the sea nothing would
have pleased me better than to have accompanied you
thither, but I hear that one friend at least has preceded
you, and is there now, Stephen Spring Rice. That we
may soon see you back in renewed health is the wish
and prayer of
Yours affectionately,
A. Tennyson.
Spedding was consulted as to some *' National Songs for Englishmen" published in the Examiner in 1852, " since
Easy patrons of their kin
Have left the last free race with naked coasts."
1862] NATIONAL SONGS FOR ENGUSHMEN. 343
He replies :
I will send ;£ 5 to Coventry Patmore for the Rifles, thinking that the more noise we make in that way the better, and the more we practise the less likely are we to be called upon to perform. I answered your summons to the Thatched House and found a room full of people not one of whom I knew ; all sufficiently zealous, and at the same time rational, and (so far as the pre* liminaries went) of one mind. I suppose they know one another, or some know some; and as there seemed to be no want of volunteers for the Committee and Sub-committee to arrange details, I thought I might, without abandoning my country in her extremity, leave that part of the business to them and join some club when it is organized. I think I could hit a Frenchman at 100 yards, if he did not frighten me.
Forster sent for me yesterday to look at the new poems, which I highly approve, and by no means allow of the objection suggested against the stanza^. America is our daughter but the men of America are our sons. Forster wants a name for the poet, which I think very desirable; and no gjreat matter what name is chosen so it be short and pronounceable, Alfred, Arthur, Merlin, Tyrtaeus, Edward Ball, Britannicus, Honved, Hylax, anything. Amyntor would sound well, is not hackneyed, and is good Greek for defender or protector.
Your note though dated the 2nd did not arrive yesterday till I had gone out
National Songs (1852).
When " Britons, guard your own," and " Hands all round " were written, my father along with many others regarded France under Napoleon as a serious menace to the peace of Europe. Although a passionate patriot, and a true lover of England, he was not blind to her faults, and was unprejudiced and cosmopolitan in seeing the best side of other nations ; and in later years after the Franco-German war, he was filled with admiration at the dignified way in which France was gradually
^ About America (p. 346).
1/
344 MARRIAGE. [l862
gathering herself together. He rejoiced whenever England and France were in agreement, and worked together harmoniously for the good of the world.
Britons^ guard your own.
This version was given to my mother many years afterwards, so that she might publish it with her musical setting.
Rise, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead; The world's last tempest darkens overhead:
All freedom vanish'd —
The true men banish'd — He triumphs! maybe we shall stand alone!
Britons, guard your own.
Call home your ships across Biscayan tides. To blow the battle from their oaken sides.
Why waste they yonder
Their idle thunder? Why stay they there to guard a foreign throne?
Seamen, guard your own.
We were the best of marksmen long ago.
We won old battles with our strength, the bow.
Now practise, yeomen.
Like those bowmen. Till your balls fly as their true shafts have flown.
Yeomen, guard your own.
Should they land here and but one hour prevail, There must no man go back to bear the tale;
No man to bear it,
Swear it! We swear it! Although we fought the banded world alone.
We swear to guard our own.
1862] "HANDS ALL ROUND I" 345
Hands all round^ t
First drink a health, this solemn night,
A health to England, every guest; That man's the best cosmopolite.
Who loves his native country best. May Freedom's oak for ever live
With stronger life from day to day; That man's the true Conservative
Who lops the moulder'd branch away. Hands all round I God the tyrant's hope confound! To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends, And the great name of England round and round.
A health to Europe's honest men!
Heaven guard them from her tyrant jails I From wrong'd Poerio's noisome den.
From iron'd limbs and tortured nails! We curse the crimes of southern kings.
The Russian whips and Austrian rods, We, likewise, have our evil things;
Too much we make our Ledgers Gods, Yet hands all round! God the tyrant's cause confound! To Europe's better health we drink, my friends. And the great name of England round and round.
What health to France, if France be she. Whom martial prowess only charms?
Yet tell her — Better to be free
Than vanquish all the world in arms.
^ Feb. 9th, 1852. I must send you what Landor says in a note this morning: '''Hands all round! is incomparably the best (convivial) Ijrric in the language, though Diyden^s ' Drinking Song ^ is fine.*^
John Forster to Mrs Tennyson.
346 MARRIAGE. [l852
Her frantic city's flashing heats
But fire to blast the hopes of men. Why change the titles of your streets? You fools, you'll want them all again. Yet hands all round! God the tyrant's cause confound I To France, the wiser France, we drink, my friends, And the great name of England round and round.
Gigantic daughter of the West,
We drink to thee across the flood, We know thee most, we love thee best.
For art thou not of British blood? Should war's mad blast again be blown.
Permit not thou the tyrant powers To fight thy mother here alone.
But let thy broadsides roar with ours. Hands all round I God the tyrant's cause confound ! To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends. And the great name of England round and round.
O rise, our strong Atlantic sons.
When war against our freedom springs ! O speak to Europe thro' your guns!
They can be understood by kings. You must not mix our Queen with those
That wish to keep their people fools; Our freedom's foemen are her foes.
She comprehends the race she rules. Hands all round! God the tyrant's cause confound! To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends, And the great cause of freedom round and round ^.
^^The third of Febraary, 1852,^ is not printed here because it was included in the Poevts (ed. 1872). Other contributions appeared in the ExanUtUTy but my fiither did not think them good enough to be reprinted.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHELTENHAM AND WHITBY (1852).
My father^ s letter-diary^.
Cheltenham, Jan, iSM, 185 a.
Alan Ker has taken four copies of my Ode " My Lords" to send to papers here and there. Mother was delighted beyond measure to see me, making me remorseful that I had not been here before. Alan and Mary seem well and hopeful : they say it is only a fort- night's steam to Jamaica (where he is appointed a judge), and they will not take a large outfit because at any time they can have things from England. Dobson says we could live here much better and cheaper than at Twickenham. I find the air much fresher.
{Apparently answering a query as to Count D'Orsay\)
Jan. 185 a.
Count D'Orsay is a friend of mine, co-godfather to Dickens' child with me. He is Louis Napoleon's
^ This he habitually wrote to my mother when absent from home.
' My £Either said that before this he had dined with Count D'Orsay and other firiends at John Forster^s. The Count was a glorious, handsome fellow, generally dressed in tight-fitting blue coat with gilt buttons. So carried away by D^Orsay^s splendour was Forster that he was heard shouting out above the hubbub of voices to his servant Henry: <<Good heavens, sir, butter for the Count^s flounders ! "
347
348 CHELTENHAM AND WHITBY. [l852
intimate friend and secretary, and moreover I am told a man who has wept over my poems. See how strangely things are connected. Just put the things together. Wonderful are these times, and no one knows what may arise from the smallest things. I the poet of England with the secretary of Louis Napoleon whom I have abused.
Cheltenham, yan. 22nd,
A note from Charles Weld this morning. He sent my poem to the Times^ but the Times ignores it. Alan Ker says it is not their custom to put in poems except they are allowed to subscribe the author's name. I have told him to try the Morning Chronicle: he seems for Fraser, tho' it is so long before Fraser comes out that my poem will be half superannuated like the musket. I see that here and there people are really beginning to be awake to their danger * * * *. In this horrible age of blab I can scarce trust aright
Jan. 2ird.
I have been out every day dining. The readers of the Examiner will no doubt guess the authorship from knowing Forster's friendship for me. The military letters in the Times are very interesting. The hills here have fine lights on them as seen from my windows. John Rashdall wants us to go and spend three weeks with him at Malvern.
YoKKf/ufy 1th, 1852.
Slept at Spedding's where I found they expected me. Started this morning 1 1 a.m. Hay fever atrocious with irritation of railway, nearly drove me crazed, but could not complain, the other only occupant of the carriage having a curiously split shoe for his better ease,
1862] YORK AND WHITBY. 349
and his eyes and teeth in a glare at me with pain of gout the whole way, and finally helped out by his servant, going to drink Harrogate waters. Came here to the Black Swan, ordered dinner, went out and bought weed, having left mine at Spedding's with gloves (ay me ! ). Enquired of tobacconist state of parties here, " Never was anything so satisfactory, all purity of Election, no row, no drunkenness, Mr Vincent will come in without any bother." While he was yet speaking arose a row, in- numerable mob raging, housekeepers all down the street rushed out with window-shutters to prevent windows being broken. My dinner waiting for me, I having to plunge thro* mob to get at it, essayed the fringes of the crowd, very dense nucleus of enormous brawl somewhere within. Presently the glazed hats of policemen, like sunshine striking here and there at the breaking up of a storm, showed me an issue of hope. I plunged through in the wake of the bluecoats and got home. To-morrow to Whitby. Vincent after all not returned. When I got to Waterloo the roses had snapt off short and lay at the bottom of the carriage. The porter opened the door, picked up one, snufiFed at it with vast satisfaction, and never so much as " by your leave."
5, North Terrace, West Cliff, Whitby,
July Sth, 1852.
I am set down here for a week at least in lodgings. It is rather a fine place, a river running into the sea between precipices, on one side new buildings and a very handsome royal hotel belonging to Hudson the railway king, on the other at the very top a gaunt old Abbey, and older parish Church hanging over the town amid hundreds of white gravestones that looked to my eye something like clothes laid out to dry. Moreover there
350 CHELTENHAM AND WHITBY. [l852
is the crackiness of an election going on and lots of pink and blue flags, and insane northland boatmen of Danish breed, who meet and bang each other for the love of liberty, foolish fellows. In the midst of the row yester- day came a funeral followed by weeping mourners, a great hearse, plumes nodding and mourning coach, and the gaunt old Abbey looked down with its hollow eyes on the life and death, the drunkenness and the political fury, rather ironically as it seemed to me, only that it was too old to have much feeling left about anything. No bathing men were to be had, so I e'en walked into the sea by myself and had a very decent bathe. Hay fever was much better yesterday and is bad again this morning. I could not write yesterday for I came in after the post had started by a very pretty rail which curves like a common road between great wolds, the Esk, which is the stream that debouches here, running below. Then we really went down a considerable hill with a rope. The same thing I think occurs at Li^ge, but this seemed to me much steeper. I am told there are very fine views in the neighbourhood, though most probably I shall not get out far enough to see them as it is pesti- lent hot
Wmrvr,/u/y 13/*.
I want to go to RedclifiFe Scar which old Wordsworth once told me of, or perhaps to Bolton Abbey. I think it a great pity that your " Sweet and low " hadn't the start of all these musical jottings. I have had two very good days coasting, I mean walking along on and under the cliflFs. Very singular they are with great bivalve shells sticking out of them. They are made of a great dark slate-coloured shale (is it to be called ?) that comes showering down ever and anon from a great height ; and on the hard flat rock which makes the beach on one side of the town (for on the other side are sands), you see
1852] AN OLD SMUGGLER. 35I
beautiful little ammonites which you stoop to pick up but find them part of the solid rock. You know these are the snakes which St Hilda drove over the clifiF and falling they lost their heads, and she changed them into stone. I found a strange fish on the shore with rainbows about its wild staring eyes, enclosed in a sort of sack with long tentacula beautifully coloured, quite dead, but when I took it up by the tail it spotted all the sand underneath with great drops of ink, so I suppose it was a kind of cuttle-fish. I found too a pale pink orchis on the sea bank and a pink vetch, a low sort of shrub with here and there a thorn. I am reading lots of novels. The worst is they do not last longer than the day. I am such a fierce reader I think I have had pretty well my quantum suflF. : Venables' anecdotes are very interesting indeed. One cannot help wishing that such a man as Gladstone may come to sit on the top branch of the tree.
Whtiby,/!^ Z9M.
I have ordered a carriage and am going to see Lord Normanby's park near here, tho* I am half afraid of it, a carriage so excites my hay fever. I met an old smuggler on the coast yesterday who had been in Lord N.'s service (not as smuggler of course!), and he took me for Lord Normanby at first, a likeness I have been told of more than once before. I got into conversation with him and I am going to call for him to-day and he is to show me the caves and holes in the coast where they used to land their kegs. I am going from here to-morrow, I think I shall go by the Scarboro' packet but I am not certain. I shall most likely pop down on Charles at Grasby, but if I go to Scarboro' I hardly think I shall go out of my way again to Leeds. I shall like much to see the Brownings again, Mrs B. par- ticularly. I suppose when I come back the Lushingtons
352 CHELTENHAM AND WHITBY. [l852
will want me to spend some days at Park House. I have seen no houses here to be sold, but then I have not looked out for them. A tailor who sewed me on some buttons, told me Whitby was remarkable for longevity, the healthiest place in England except some place (he said) near Cheltenham, he had forgotten the name. I dare say he meant Malvern.
GjuiSBY,/ufy 22nd.
I came by the packet boat to Scarborough where I stopt the night and came on here yesterday. The train only stopt at Moortown, and I was obliged to walk through the fields to Grasby when I admired the deep long-stemmed Lincolnshire wheat which I had not seen for many a day.
I find Charles and Louisa very well, only Charles rather low as it seems to me. It is a nice little place they have and the country really looks pretty at this time of vear. I shall stop a few days.
Grasby, /ufy 27M.
Pray take drives every day. The school children have a feast here to-morrow for which I am going to stay. They run in sacks and do all manner of queer things. Our parson-party went off well. Agnes I suppose will be triumphant to-morrow. I think when I leave here I shall go round by Grimsby to see the new docks and perhaps get a bathe at Cleethorpes.
We went over to drink tea the other afternoon with Mr Maclean, the Vicar of Caistor, where I made fun for the children, and saw a young cuckoo which a boy had found in a sparrow's nest, a rather rare circumstance so late in July ; but the boy had had him for three weeks and fed him with worms. He was a good deal duskier than the adult cuckoo, and with a white band on his head and very voracious, would have swallowed anything.
1862] VISITS CROWLAND ABBEY. 353
KULLf/ufy 31J/.
I am going out of the way to see Crowland Abbey and maybe shall stop a day or so there. I write this in vast haste at the Mason Arms, Louth. Daddy ^ drove me over last night to Grimsby to see the new dock, truly a great work.
When he reached home, Monckton Milnes asked him to dinner. He wrote :
My dear Milnes,
I have never dined in town (except once with Hallam en famille when I met him by chance in Lear the painter's rooms looking at his picture of the Syracusan Quarries *, and once or twice with my brother- in-law en famille also) since I dined with you, Heaven knows how long ago, and met Doyle and others. I have given up dining out and am about to retire into utter solitude in some country house, but if you feel aggrieved at sending one invitation after another to me, unaccepted, I will come. You have not mentioned your hour 6 ? 7 ? 8 ? let me know. Do not bother yourself about giving me a bed, I can get one (and my own way too in the matter of smoke) better at Spedding's. Really I am very unwell and, tho' hay fever sometimes lets me alone for a whole day together, yet it sometimes makes me quite unfit to sit at table. Send me a line to say what your hour is and what Maurice's hour is and I will see if I can come in time for Maurice.
Ever yours,
A. Tennyson,
* Henry Sellwood.
^ Now in the drawing-room at Farringford.
T. L 33
354 CHELTENHAM AND WHITBY. [l862
To James Spedding. Dear J. S.
Can you let me have your attic next Satur- day night and Sunday? I am going to dine with Milnes on Sunday, he has offered me a bed but I am more at mine ease in mine inn (smoking-room I should say)
with you.
*****
Go and see (and having seen, if you can interest yourself in) Thomas Woolner s design for the W. W.^ Westminster monument. I am told it is good and I promised to say a good word for him.
Ever yours, A. Tennyson.
^ Wordsworth, now in the drawing-room at Farringford.
CHAPTER XVII.
TWICKENHAM (1852-53).
Early in 1852 my father and mother went on a visit to one of his old College friends, Mr. Rashdall the cler- gyman of Malvern, and met the Carlyles and Sydney Dobell \ Rashdall was a man so beloved by his parish- ioners, and so simple and direct in his language from the pulpit, that he had emptied the Dissenting Chapels for miles round. He would often hold his Church services in the fields. A flowery record of Spring follows in my mother's journal, about the beauty of the daffodils, wood anemones, primroses, and violets ; the pear trees through- out the country in bloom "like springing and falling fountains." While they were there my father read Dr Wordsworth's Apocalypse to my mother. On their return to Twickenham, he visited the Exhibition, and was delighted with Millais' "Ophelia" and "The Huguenot,'* but liked "The Huguenot" much the best. They came to know the Peels at Marble Hill, and Archibald Peel (the General's son) pointed out the avenue in which Sir Walter Scott placed the interview between Jeanie Deans and Queen Caroline. Happy days were spent in the
^ Mr Briton Riviere writes to me : ^ I asked my brother-in-law, Sydney Dobell, to describe your father to me, and he said : ' If he were pointed out to you as the man who had written the niad^ you would answer, ^I can well bcUeveit."'"
355 «3— a
356 TWICKENHAM. [l852
little Twickenham garden, my father reading aloud pas- sages of any book which struck him. Layard's Nimeveh and Herschel's Astronomy were read at this time. Numerous friends called from London : Spedding, Ven- ables, Patmore, Edmund and Franklin Lushington, Temple, Palgrave, Jowett, the Welds and others. He writes, " lots of callers, I expect I shall be inundated." The Diary continues, "^ Hallam bom on the nth of August."
To John Forster.
Augiist iiik, x853«
My dear John Forster,
I did not tell you of my marriage which you took rather in dudgeon. Now I will tell you of the birth of a little son this day. I have seen beautiful things in my life, but I never saw anything more beauti- ful than the mother's face as she lay by the young child an hour or two after, or heard anything sweeter than the little lamblike bleat of the young one. I had fancied that children after birth had been all shriek and roar; but he gave out a little note of satisfaction every now and then, as he lay by his mother, which was the most pathetic sound in its helplessness I ever listened ta You see I talk almost like a bachelor, yet unused to these things: but you — I don't hear good reports of you. You should have been better by this. Get better quickly if you would have me be as I always am
Yours most truly, A. Tennyson.
My dear John Forster,
I have only time for one word of bulletin. Everything, I believe, is going on well, tho* the mother suffers from an almost total want of sleep, and the little
1852] BIRTH OF A SON. 357
monster does anything but what Hamlet says Osric did in his nursery-days. I found him lying alone on the third day of his life, and, while I was looking at him, I saw him looking at me with such apparently earnest, wide-open eyes, I felt as awe-struck as if I had seen a spirit. I hope you are mending.
God bless you, A. Tennyson.
To Mrs Brazvntng.
Chapel House, Twickenham,
August iithy 1852.
My dear Mrs Browning,
I wrote to you once before this morning. I now write again to tell you what I am sure your woman's and poet's heart will rejoice in, that my wife was delivered of a fine boy at 9.30 a.m. this day, and that both she and the child are doing well. I never saw any face so radiant with all high and sweet ex- pression as hers when I saw her some time after.
Ever yours truly, A. Tennyson.
Mrs Browning's reply was the first congratulatory letter.
58 Welbeck Street, Wednesday night August 12th, 185 a.
My dear Mr Tennyson,
Thank you and congratulate you indeed from my heart. May God bless you all three.
Robert said, when I was writing the note of enquiry which has gone to the post, " Tell him we will hope still for a joyful meeting," but I had not courage at that moment of crisis to mention a word of " joy."
Now I may, thank God. Will you say to dear Mrs Tensk?i^fstL
358 TWICKENHAM. [l862
when she is able to think of anything so far off as a friend, how deeply I sympathise in her happiness, with the memory of all that ecstasy as I felt it myself, still thrilling through me ?
And there are barbarians in the world who dare to call the new little creatures not pretty, ugly even 1 1
Will you after a day or two send me a " line of bulletin " ? See how I encroach upon your kindness !
Most truly yours, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
P. S. by Robert Browning.
I can't help saying too, how happy I am in your happiness and in the assurance that it is greater than even you can quite know yet God bless, dear Tennyson, you and all yours.
R. B.
Saturday.
My dear Mrs Browning,
Here is one word of bulletin as you desired. All is doing as well as can be.
To this one word, let me add another, that is how
. very grateful your little note and Browning's epilogue
made me. I began to read it to my wife but could not
get on with it, so I put it away by her bedside, and she
shall read it as soon as she reads anything.
Ever yours and your husband's,
A. Tennyson.
" From the first," my mother writes, "Alfred watched Hallam with interest ; some of his acquaintances would have smiled to see him racing up and down stairs and dandling the baby in his arms." The poem "Out of the Deep " was begun then and finished long afterwards. The christening was at Twickenham, the godfathers being Henry Hallam and F. D. Maurice.
1862] THE GODFATHERS. 359
From Henry Hallam.
Wilton Crescent, At^ust 2$/h, 1853. My dear Alfred Tennyson,
I returned from a three weeks' tour in France late
last night Of your paternal dignity, lately accrued, I had had
no information. This is my excuse for delay in acknowledging
your letters of the i6th and in expressing at once my sincere
congratulations on the event, and my most willing acceptance
of the office which you desire me to undertake. That the names
of Hallam and Tennyson should be united in the person of this
infant will be to me a gratifying reflection for the remainder of
my days. You have already made those names indissoluble.
I beg you to give my kind regards to Mrs A. Tennyson. My
daughter is at her own house at Hayes in Kent ; I shall soon
go down.
Yours most truly, H. Hallam.
JFrom Rev. F. D. Maurice.
Bodington Rectory, nr. Shrewsbury, August yithf 1852.
My dear Sir,
I am almost ashamed to confess the pleasure which your note of this morning caused me. It does not look like the proper feeling of responsibility of the office with which the kindness of Mrs Tennyson and you would invest me, to have* experienced such delight, and I am afraid you will think very differently and much more truly of my Christianity when you hear of it. But I have so very much to thank you for, especially of late years since I have known your poetry better and I hope I have been somewhat more in a condition to learn from it, that I cannot say how thankful I feel to you for wishing that I should stand in any nearer and more personal relation to you. I beg you to express to Mrs Tennyson how very much I value this proof of her confidence and how much I hope I may not prove utterly unworthy of it
Very truly yours, F. D. Maurice.
360 TWICKENHAM. [1862
From Mrs Browning.
58 Welbeck Street, Sept 1852.
My dear Mrs Tennyson,
It is delightful always to have kind words, most delightful to have them from you.
We had resolved on leaving England on the iifth, but you o£Fer us an irresistible motive for staying, in spite of fogs and cold. So you will see us on Tuesday, and we shall come in time for the ceremony : we would not miss the christening for the world.
And I must tell you, a baby has screamed in this house ever since we have been in England, much to my sympathy...only, as the child grows fatter and fatter I have come to consider the screaming to be a sign of prosperity. Still, it is very painful to hear a young child : when he cried I was always near crying myself. Only the fact is that these little creatures will make much ado about nothing sometimes, and we are wrong in reading their ills too large through our imag^ation. I hope to find your darling well and serene on Tuesday, and yourself stronger than you seem to be now.
Let me be (why not ?)
Affectionately yours always,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
From Charles Dickens.
Dover, 1st Oct 1852. My dear Tennyson,
I have received your note here only to-day. It would have given me the heartiest pleasure to have welcomed a young Tennyson to this breathing world wherein he is much wanted, on so good an occasion as his christening, but that I have engaged to go to Boulogne on Sunday for a fortnight I shall drink his health on the fifth.
As your letter bears no address and as I cannot call your address to mind, I send this to Moxon's care.
Ever yours, Charles Dickens.
1862] THE CHRISTENING. 36 1
From Frederick Tennyson.
Villa Torregiani, 1852.
Having duly received the bulletins announcing an autumnal shoot of the old Laurel in the shape of Hallam Tennyson (is this his only name ?) I write not only to wish you joy of your new acquisition but to have more particulars from you on that all engrossing subject Is he to turn out a dove or an eagle ? Has he a hawking eye and the aquiline supremacy of the Csesars in his nose or is there a classical type of head, a Belvederino with strong ideality ? Will the pencils of the rays of the ances- tral Intellectualities converge into a focus in the concavity of his cranium and be reflected therefrom in redoubled warmth and light, or will they neutralize one another and become common sense, a very good thing ? You will probably be better enabled to answer these questions some ten years hence than now, but it is astonishing how early children begin to exhibit distinctive qualities. In my three little girls I fancy I detect strong marks of Individualities.
Your affectionate brother, F. T.
There was some question as to the name, whether it should be Arthur or Hallam. My father called out in a clear voice, that rang through the church, " Hallam," which pleased Henry Hallam, though jokingly he said in London : " They would not name him Alfred lest he should turn out a fool, and so they named him ' Hallam.' " Thinking that in future it would be an interesting link with a former age\ his parents took him with them to old Samuel Rogers, and Rogers, bowing to my mother, said in his courtly and diplomatic way, " Mrs Tennyson, I made one great mistake in my life, I never married."
In November was the burial of the Duke of Wel- lington. The Ode was published on the morning of
^ Rogers, my &ther told me, had had his hand on Dr Johnson^s knocker, but was too shy to knock and bad run away without seeing the great man.
362 TWICKENHAM. [l862-
the funeral, but some additions were made to it after- wards ^
My father wrote : Nov. \%th. "Have seen the pro- cession at the Duke of Wellington's funeral : very fine ; hope to see the interior of St Paul's before I leave." To Edward Fitzgerald he observed: "At the funeral I was struck with the look of sober manhood in the British soldier." " In the midst of the solemn silence," said my father, " Magdalene Brookfield whispered to her mother when she saw the Duke's boots carried by his charger, ' Mama, when I am dead shall I be that ? ' meaning the boots."
It is interesting to note that while the Ode was being abused in all directions by the Press my father wrote thus to his publishers : " If you lose by the Ode, I will not consent to accept the whole sum of £200, which you offered me. I consider it quite a sufficient loss if you do not gain by it."
Henry Taylor wrote:
MORTLAKE, Nov. 17/^, 1 85 3.
I have read your ode (" Death of the Duke of Wellington "), and I believe that many thousands at present, and that many hundreds of thousands in future times, will feel about it as I do, or with a yet stronger and deeper feeling ; and I am sure that every one will feel about it according to his capacity of feeling what is great and true. It has a greatness worthy of its theme and an absolute simplicity and truth, with all the poetic passion of your nature moving beneath.
And here is my father's reply :
Seaford House, Seaford, Nov. 23^/, 1852.
Thanks, thanks ! I have just returned from Reading and found your letter. In the all but universal depre-
1 The Ode was written in the << Green Room,'' Chapel House, Twickenham.
1868] LETTER TO DR APPLEBY STEPHENSON. 363
ciation 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.
Ever, my dear Taylor, yours,
A. Tennyson.
This autumn the Twickenham meadows were so much flooded that my father and mother moved to Sea- ford, Brighton and Farnham. At the last place Charles Kingsley came to see them, fresh and vivacious as ever.
At the beginning of next year (1853) ^Y father was asked whether he would allow himself to be nominated as Rector of the University of Edinburgh. He replied :
To Appleby Stephenson^ M.D.
London, March is/, 1853.
Sir,
Your letter of the twenty-fourth of February has reached me only this morning. I trust that yourself and those other gentlemen, whom you speak of as being willing to give their vote for me as President of your University, will forgive me when I say that however gratefully sensible of the honour intended me, I must beg leave with many thanks to decline it. I could neither undertake to come to Edinboro' nor to deliver an inaugural address at the time specified. You will doubtless find another and worthier than myself to fill this office.
I am. Sir, your obliged and obedient servant,
A. Tennyson.
My father then went oflf house-hunting and wrote from Farnham to my mother :
Farnham.
" I saw Elstead Lodge yesterday, dry soil but quite flat, with view of distant hills, and one hill very near:
364 TWICKENHAM. [l858
splendid lawn but house looking north. The park here is delicious and the little house to be sold has a large
garden As for the house, you would find the rooms
too low. If I buy, there is plenty of room for building two good additional rooms. I saw the lawyer here and he has given me the refusal. It is quite retired, just under the Bishop's palace. What an air after Twicken- ham! I walked over to Hale and looked into the old premises \"
In the summer my father and mother took a tour to York', Whitby, Redcar, Richmond and Grasby. He left her at Richmond to return to Grasby, and went with Palgrave to Glasgow. From Glasgow the change was very pleasant when the travellers found themselves at Carstairs, the home of my father's old college friend, Robert Monteith. " The Daisy " was written in Edin- burgh ; and " To Edward Lear, on his Travels in Greece " was printed at this time among the collected poems.
Farringford^ .
Later my father paid a visit to Bonchurch. There he heard of Farringford as a place that might possibly be suitable for his home, as it was beautiful and far
^ Where my grandfather, Henry Sellwood, lived with my mother after leaving Homcastle.
'My Either wrote from Taifs Hotel, July 29th, 1853: ^A Roman epitaph in the Museum at York touched me :
D. M. Simplidae Florentine
Anime innocentissime
Que vixit menses decern.
Felicius Simplex Pater Fedt.
Leg. VI. V.''
*The name Farringford is old. I have in my possession deeds of the fourteenth century signed by Walter de Ferringford. Prior*s Manofi attached to Farringford, belonged to the Abbey of Lyra in Normandy. Many of the fields retain the old names of that time, the Prior^s Field, Maiden's Croft (dedicated to the Virgin Mary), the Qerks' Hill, Abraham's Mead, etc.
1863] FARRINGFORD. 365
from the haunts of men. " If society were what it is not," wrote Lady Taylor to Aubrey de Vere, " it might be well to give up something for it." Society being what it is, he determined to quit Twickenham and to live a country life of earnest work, only seeing his many friends from time to time. When my mother and he went down to look at Farringford, they crossed the Solent in a rowing boat on a still November evening, and "One dark heron flew over the sea, backed by a daflfodil sky."
Next day, as they gazed from the drawing-room window out through the distant wreath of trees towards a sea of Mediterranean blue, with rosy capes beyond, the down on the left rising above the foreground of undu- lating park, golden-leaved elms and chestnuts, and red- stemmed pines, they agreed that they must if possible have that view to live with.
Nov. 14/A, 1853. My father writes: "I wrote on Friday to accept ^ the house (Farringford), I also wrote to-day to Moxon to advance one thousand pounds, four hundred pounds he owes me, the odd six hundred to be paid if he will in March when I get my moneys in. Why I did it ? Because by buying safe debentures in the East Lincolnshire Line for two thousand five hundred pounds, with that and five hundred * a year I think we ought to get on...Venables and Chapman agree in the propriety of the investment. Seymour has sent no papers yet. I don't know what is to be done with Laurence: it would be in the highest degree inconvenient for me to come back from the Isle of Wight to sit for him. Fitz would, I have no doubt, let him have his old sketch of me."
Accordingly on November the 24th, having taken the house on trial, they left Twickenham, and on the
^ To lease the house with the option of buying it.
' The sum which since 1850 he had made from his books.
366 TWICKENHAIL [l863
25th entered into possession of Farringford, which was to be a home to them for forty years, and where some of my father's best-known works were written. Mrs Thackeray Ritchie describes the place in her pleasant Records^ as she saw it when it had become their own.
For the first time I stayed in the Island, and with the people who were dwelling there, and walked with Tennyson along High Down, treading the turf, listening to his talk, while the gulls came sideways, flashing their white breasts against the edge of the cliffs and the Poet's cloak flapped time to the gusts of the west wind The house at Farringford itself seemed like a charmed palace, with green walls without, and speaking walls within. There hung Dante with his solemn nose and wreath ; Italy gleamed over the doorways ; friends' faces lined the pas- sages, books filled the shelves, and a glow of crimson was everywhere ; the oriel drawing-room window was full of green and golden leaves, of the soimd of birds and of the distant sea.
My father and mother settled to a country life at once, looking after their little farm, and tending the poor and sick of the village. In the afternoons they swept up leaves, mowed the grass, gravelled the walks, and he built what he called " a bower of rushes " in the kitchen garden. The primroses and snowdrops and other flowers were a constant delight, and he began a flower dictionary. He also bought spy-glasses through which he might watch the ways and movements of the birds in the ilexes, cedar and fir trees. Geology too he took up, and trudged out with the local geologist, Keeping, on many a long expedition.
He wrote to Charles Kingsley about Hypatia :
1853. My dear Kingsley,
. I hope your wife got my books which mine ordered Moxon to send. In the conclusion of the " Princess " the compositors have made a slight mistake.
1868] " HYPATIA." 367
Gray halls alone among their massive groves.
They have printed "their" "the" which somewhat weakens the line.
Hypatia never came; but I cannot afiFord to be without it. Part of the conclusion seems to me par- ticularly valuable. I mean the talk of the Christianized Jew to the classic boy. Hypatia's mistreatment by the Alexandrians I found almost too horrible. It is very powerful and tragic ; but I objected to the word " naked." Pelagia's nakedness has nothing which revolts one... but I really was hurt at having Hypatia stript, tho' I see that it adds to the tragic, and the picture as well as the moral is a fine one.
Will you lay your hand on my Adam Smith and send it per post ? I enclose you six Queen's heads for that purpose.
Believe me, dear Kingsley,
Ever yours, A. Tennyson.
CHAPTER XVIIL
FARRINGFORD (1855-1855).
Throughout the following chapters I have, with my mother's leave, made free use of her private joumaL Most of it however has been necessarily compressed; and the numerous anecdotes about our childhood have been eliminated^
Here however I may perhaps be allowed to note my father's attitude toward children. This has best been given in his baby-songs, "Sweet and Low,** " What does little birdie say ? " ** Minnie and Winnie," "Dainty Little Maiden," and his dedicatory poem to " Ally." I will however endeavour to set down briefly what I myself have known of some of his ways with children, and to begin with, what I have heard of his love for them in days before my own.
When he was a young man, living at Somersby, I have been told by those of the family younger than himself that " Alfred was their delight." They would sit upon his knee, or cling about his feet, while he told them stories of his own invention that enthralled them, long stories of hair-breadth escapes, and of travels ranging over all parts of the world. For the boys he would make himself a Colossus of Rhodes, the fun being that they should brave a " thwack " from his open hand, or escape it if they could, while rushing under the arch- way of his legs.
368
1853] HOME UFE. 369
Of babies he would say: "There is something gigantic about them. The wide-eyed wonder of a babe has a grandeur in it which as children they lose. They seem to me to be prophets of a mightier race."
To his own children he was devoted. From the first he would, when my mother and he were alone, carry me in my bassinet into the drawing-room that he might watch my baby-gestures; and one of the very early things which I remember is that he helped the Master of Balliol to toss my brother and myself in a shawl. Later, he made us, though still very young, as much as possible his little companions. My mother was not strong enough to walk as far as we did, and so my father would harness my brother and myself to her garden carriage, and himself push from behind; and in this fashion we raced up hill and down dale. When the days were warm enough, perhaps we sat together on a bank in one of our home-fields, and he would read to us, or in cold weather would play football with us boys in an old chalk-pit, or build castles of flint on the top of the " Beacon Cliflf," and we all then cannonaded from a distance, or he would teach us to shoot with bow and arrow. Some days we went flower-hunting, and on our return home, if the flower was unknown, he would say, " Bring me my Baxter's Flowering Plants^' to look it out for us.
If it was rainy or stormy, and we were kept indoors, he often built cities for us with bricks, or played battle- dore and shuttlecock; or sometimes he read Grimm's Fairy Stories or repeated ballads to us. I remember his emphatic recitation in those far-ofiF years of
" Malbrouck s'en va-t'en guerre, Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,"
and of " Si le roi m'avait donn6
Paris sa grand' ville,"
T. I. 24
370 FARRINGFORD. [l863
and of " Ye Mariners of England,"
and of " The Burial of Sir John Moore."
On feast days he would blow bubbles and then grow much excited over the "gorgeous colours and land- scapes, and the planets breaking off from their suns, and the single star becoming a double star," which he saw in these bubbles ; or if it were evening he would help us to act scenes from some well-known play. He enjoyed superintending our boy-charades, and if a prologue had to be written would make the most amusing part of it.
In the autumn we had frequent brushing up of leaves from the lawns, and he would employ us in helping to make new glades through the shrubs or in re-shingling old paths. It was a red-letter day when an Italian organ-grinder came, as he did more years than one, and was asked to warm himself by our bonfire of leaves and wood, while my father and he told stories of Savoy, Piedmont and Lombardy. My father was always in- terested in the imaginative views which we children took of our surroundings. Of these I may give one instance : how Lionel had been brought from his bed at night, wrapt in a blanket, to see the great comet, and suddenly awaking and looking out at the starry night, asked, " Am I dead ? "
The chief anxiety of my parents, I remember, was that we should be strictly truthful, and my father's words, spoken long ago, still dwell with me, " A truthful man generally has all virtues." He was very particular about our being courteous to the poor. The severest punish- ment he ever gave me, though that was, it must be confessed, slight, was for some want of respect to one of our servants.
The first Latin I learnt from him was Horace's O fons Bandusies, and the first Greek the beginning of
^/(al'fa,,, .i .y,™,/'.''A„,y,™.
^
1863] HOME UFE. 37 1
the Iliad. Before this he liked to make us learn and repeat ballads, and simple poems about Nature, but he would never teach us his own poems, or allow us to get them by heart.
In the summer as children we generally passed through London to Lincolnshire, and he would take us for a treat to Westminster Abbey, the Zoological Gardens, the Tower of London, the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, or the National Gallery. In the last he much delighted and would point us out the various excellences of the diflFerent masters; he always led the way first of all to the " Raising of Lazarus " by Sebastian del Piombo and to Titian's '* Bacchus and Ariadne."
A favourite saying was, " Make the lives of children as beautiful and as happy as possible." In the later years of his life his grandchildren loved a romp with him, and enjoyed their drives when he would fight them with newspapers or play " pat-a-cake " with them. To the end he liked a "frolic with young things," and when on one of his last walks he met the village school-children, he pointed his stick at them, barking like a dog to make them laugh. In 1889, after he had turned eighty, he wrote the lullaby in " Romney's Remorse," partly for his little grandson Lionel :
Father and mother will watch you grow. And gather the roses whenever they blow. And find the white heather wherever you go.
My sweet.
These anecdotes about him and his children, as I read them over, seem trivial enough, yet I preserve them, as testifying in their way to the " eternal youth of the poet."
24 — 2
372 FARRINGFORD. [l864
The year 1854 opened with the booming of cannon from Portsmouth, where the artillery were practising for the Crimean war. On March i6th Lionel was bom. My father when he heard of the birth was looking through the study window at the planet Mars "as he glowed like a ruddy shield on the Lion's breast," and so determined to give the name Lionel.
After Lionel's birth he writes to Mrs Cameron and to John Forster:
March iind, 1854.
My dear Mrs Cameron,
In my first batch of letters, sent ofiF in all directions, when the new babe was born, I omitted to write to you, not willingly, but of necessity, not knowing your " Terrace," and my wife, who did know, not being to be spoken to.... But I hope that this day, the sixth from her confinement, will, ere it fade (a very brilliant one over cape and sea), see her well, except for weakness. I have been mesmerizing her, which, she says, has done her a great deal of good. If she could but get a sleep- ful night, I have no doubt it would be all right by the morrow. As for the little fellow, he is as jolly as can be, and hardly cries at all yet. Little Hallam watches him, awe-struck, cannot make him out, and occasionally wails over him. I daresay that these are phenomena which you have often tenderly watched in your own family. You have not written, which I would far rather impute to the fact of my not having written than to the pos- sibility of your being unwell. Pray Heaven the last be not the case with you; neither has Mary Marshall answered, which makes me anxious about her. God bless you, dear Julia Cameron, and
Believe me afiEectionately yours,
A. Tennyson.
1854] LETTER TO FORSTER. 373
Fakringford House, Isle of Wight, March 2gth, 1854.
My dear Forster,
I understand from Archibald Peel that you are aggrieved at my not writing to you : that is wrong, morbid I think. I almost never write except in answer. Why, if you wished to know of me did you not write to me and you would have heard? Pray don't be distrustful. I love you all the same, tho' I should not write for loo years.
Now it happens that a letter was half written to you partly to condole with you on the loss of dear good genial Talfourd, partly to announce the birth of another son of mine. I had dozens of letters to indite at that time to female cousins, etc., and I put this by to finish another day, and I cannot find it, or I would send it to prove that you are not forgotten, but you musi be more trustful of me, or how can we get on ? You must at any rate try the efiFect of a small note addrest to me before you find fault with me.
A reason for my not writing much is the bad con- dition of my right eye which quite suddenly came on as I was reading or trying to read small Persian text. You know perhaps how very minute in some of those Eastern tongues are the diflFerences of letters : a little dot more or less : in a moment, after a three hours' hanging over this scratchy text, my right eye became filled with great masses of floating blackness, and the other eye similarly affected tho' not so badly. I am in a great fear about them, and think of coming up to town about them, for (whatever you may conjecture) I have not been in town for many months, not ever since I came here — did not even pass thro' town on my way here but went by Kingston.
I beseech your and all my friends' most charitable interpretation of whatever I do or may be said to do.
374 FAIlRINGFORt>. [^186<
Our post only allows us from 1 1 o'clock to i o'clock to receive and answer letters which is (I think) another reason why I write so few.
I have been correcting my brother Frederick's proofs \ I dare say you may have seen notice of their approaching publication. He is a true poet, though his book (I think) ought to have been a shorter one.
Farewell, my dear fellow, God bless you and keep you.
Yours aflfectionately and unchangingly,
A. Tennyson.
My wife's kind regards to you : she has been in a great state of suflFering and sleeplessness for nine days, but at last I set her right by mesmerizing, — the eflFect was really wonderful.
In April the diary says that he drew my mother out in her garden chair to see the "wealth of daffodils" and the ruby sheaths of the lime leaves. At this time Edward Fitzgerald stayed at Farringford for a fortnight ; he sketched and my father carved in wood. One day Fitzgerald brought home bunches of horned poppies and yellow irises over which like a boy he was ecstatic. In the evenings he played Mozart, or translated Persian Odes for my father, who, as has been said in the letter to Forster, had hurt his eyes by poring over a small- printed Persian Grammar: until this with Hafiz and other Persian books had to be hidden away, for he had seen " the Persian letters stalking like giants round the walls of his room." My father observed that his best working days were "in the early spring, when Nature begins to awaken from her winter sleep."
^ Days and Hours.
1864] LETTER ABOUT THE CHILDREN. 375
To this date belongs the following letter to a friend :
You will not often see anything so sweet as my little, not quite two years old boy, who is toddling up and down the room, and saying, "Da, date," and "dada," meaning "give" in a very respectable Italian lingo, pointing to everything that strikes his fancy. Singularly enough the very day when I despatched my note to you another boy was born at 9 p.m., a lusty young fellow, who strikes the elder one with awe, sometimes into sympathetic tears, sometimes into a kind of mimic bleat- ing, when he hears the younger one's inarticulate cooings. The first we had was born dead (a great grief to us), really the finest boy of the three ; and I nearly broke my heart with going to look at him. He lay like a little warrior, having fought the fight, and failed, with his hands clenched, and a frown on his brow... .If my latest bom were to die to-night, I do not think that I should suflFer so much as I did, looking on that noble little fellow who had never seen the light. My wife, who had had a most terrible time lasting near the whole of one Easter Sunday, never saw him. Well for her.
Yours, A. Tennyson.
In May my father stayed in London and in August visited Glastonbury, Wells and the Cheddar Cliffs.
My father^ s letter-diary.
May i8tA, 1854. 60 Lincoln's Inn Fields. I called on Moxon to arrange the " Illustrated Edition of Poems," and we went round to the artist Creswick, a capital broad genial fellow ; Mulready, an old man, was full of vivacity and showed me lots of his drawings and one
376 FARRINGFORD. [l864
or two of his pictures. Then on to Horsley who was likewise very amiable and said that I was the painter's poet, etc., then on to Millais, who has agreed to come down in a month's time and take little Hallam as an illustration of " Dora." Sir E. Landseer I did not call upon and Holman Hunt was out of town.
Went to Forster's, and am going now to dine with Spedding somewhere, and then going to the Exhibition.
May 2\st. Grove called and will be ready to show us the Crystal Palace. On Friday I dine with Frederick Locker, on Saturday with Forster.
May 22nd. I went to the Crystal Palace yesterday with Weld: certainly a marvellous place, but yet all in confusion. I do not think that it will be worth while to go up on the loth for the opening, as it will be by no means so striking an a£Fair as the last opening, 185 1. I was much pleased with the Pompeian house and with the Iguanodons and Ichthyosaurs. I dined with Frank Lushington at the Oxford and Cambridge Club after- wards; Horatio dined with us. Tom Taylor came to Spedding's in the evening and gave me a book of Breton ballads, exceedingly beautiful, many of them.
May 22rd. I called on Hallam yesterday, he looks very well.
I came to Glastonbury after parting from Grant \ then to Yeovil in a fly, 17 miles, which rather jarred against my paternity when I thought that little Hallam and Lionel had to be educated. I went to the Abbey. As soon as I got there, there rose an awful thunderstorm^ and I took shelter over Arimathaean Joseph's bones in
^ Sir Alexander Grant who was first head of the University of Bombaiyy afterwards Principal of the University of Edinburgh.
1864] SIR JOHN SIMEON. 377
the crypt of his chapel for they say (credat Judaeus) he lies there. Only one arch remains.
Walked over to Wells. To Wookey Hole this morn- ing, a cave; it was not quite what I wanted to see, tho' very grim. Am at the Swan Hotel, shall go over to Cheddar to-morrow.
Arrived at Cheddar to-day and have just seen a stalactite cavern, a thing I had never seen before.
August I jth. Corfe Castle, Christchurch, very well worth seeing: Bournemouth fashionable, not at all a place to buy a house in. We found an old Waterloo soldier on the coast.
When my father had returned to Farringford, he and my mother "saw a great deal of the Simeons, Aubrey de Vere and Baron de Schroeter from Swainston, and lengthy were the discussions on Roman Catholicism." My father was much impressed by the deeply felt religious enthusiasm of the Baron, who was like an old ascetic monk, and anxious to convert my parents.
Of Sir John Simeon's first visits his daughter, Mrs Richard Ward, writes :
On the day of Lionel's christening my father paid his first visit to Farringford, and found the family party just returning from church. During these early years, it was one of my father's greatest pleasures to ride or drive over from Swainston in the summer afternoons. He and the Tennysons would go long expeditions through the lanes and over the downs : then back through the soft evening air to dinner and to the long evening of talk and of reading, which knit " that fair companionship " and made it " such a friendship as had mastered time."
It was then that my father worked at "Maud," morning and evening, sitting in his hard high-backed wooden chair in his little room at the top of the house. His " sacred pipes," as he called them, were half an hour after breakfast, and half an hour after dinner, when no one
378 FARRINGFORD. [18M
was allowed to be with him, for then his best thoughts came to him. As he made the diflFerent poems he would repeat or read them. The constant reading of the new poems aloud was the surest way of helping him to find out any defects there might be. During his "sacred half -hours " and his other working hours and even on the Downs, he would murmur his new passages or new lines as they came to him, a habit which had always been his since boyhood, and which caused the Somersby cook to say " What is master Awlf red always a praying for ? "
Aubrey de Vere writes of this year :
In 1854 I went from Swainston, the residence of Sir John Simeon, my friend, and the friend no less of Alfred Tennyson, in whose elegiac lines his memory is embalmed for ever, to Farringford, where the poet then made abode with his wife and two children. The eldest was about two years old ; the other an infant in arms; and I was so much struck by his eyes, the most contemplative which I had ever seen, that I exclaimed, "When that child g^ows to be a man he must be a Carthusian monk ! ** " Nothing of the sort," was the answer I received; "but a happy husband, and a happy father, in a happy home." The home I stood in was a happy home; and the fortnight I spent in it was one I can never forget. The recollection of it is all the more delightful because it carries with it little sense of variety, " So like, so very like was day to day." The year had reached its zenith : the sky was almost always blue, and the lovely gleam of sea was a somewhat darker blue, while the healthful breezes of Freshwater prevented even the noontide from feeling sultry. The earlier part of the day I spent chiefly in reading and writing : in the afternoon we sometimes read aloud in the open air, or rather we listened to the Poet's reading, with such distractions alone as were caused by a bird-note louder than the rest or a distant sea-gleam more bright. On one occasion our book, which we agreed in greatly admiring, was Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House^ then recent. Alfred and I had many a breezy walk along the Downs and as far as The Needles, sometimes with distant views of the coast flushed by sunset, sometimes with a nearer
1864] WALKS ON THE ISLAND. 379
one of the moonbeams " marbling " the wet sea-sands, as the wave recoiled, which last always reminded me of Landor's lines,
"And the long moonbeam on the hard wet sands Lay like a jasper column half uprear'd."
Tennyson was engaged on his new poem " Maud." Its origin and composition were, as he described them, singular. He had accidentally lighted upon a poem of his own which beg^s, " O that 'twere possible," and which had long before been published in a selected volume got up by Lord Northampton for the aid of a sick clergyman. It had struck him, in consequence, I think, of a suggestion made by Sir John Simeon, that, to render the poem fully intelligible, a preceding one was necessary. He wrote it ; the second poem too required a predecessor; and thus the whole work was written, as it were, backwards. The readers of " Maud " seldom observe that in the love-complexities of that poem the birds take a vehement part. The " birds in the high Hall-garden" are worldly birds, factious for the young Lord and the millionaire Brother :
Where is Maud, Maud, Maud, One is come to woo her?
The " birds in our wood " are as ardent partizans of the lovers. I remarked to the Poet on this circumstance ; but his answer was as vague as the "mowt a bean " of the " Northern Farmer."
This summer my father wrote of Freshwater to a friend : " Ours is by far in my opinion the most note- worthy part of the island, with an air on the Downs * worth,' as somebody said, * sixpence a pint' "
Through the autumn and winter evenings he trans- lated aloud to my mother the sixth /Eneid of Virgil and Homer's description of Hades, and they read Dante's Inferno together. Whewell's Plurality of Worlds he also carefully studied. " It is to me anything," he writes, " but a satisfactory book. It is inconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun."
380 FARRINGFORD. [18M
The excitement about the Crimean War was intense. On October loth the papers were full of the particulars of the battle of the Alma ^ The journal says : " Looking from the Beacon and seeing the white cliflFs and the clear sea, their violet gray shading seemed to us tender and sad ; perhaps the landscape seemed so sad because of the sorrowful news of the death-roll in the Crimea and of the death of our neighbour Colonel Hood in the trenches."
In November an unknown friend sent an account of the charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava on Octo- ber 25th, — how the Scots Greys and the Inniskilleners flung themselves against the solid Russian column. The writer says : " Our ears were frenzied by the monotonous incessant cannonade going on for days together."
On November 22nd Millais' long promised visit was paid. He was " beguiled into sweeping up leaves and burning them *. He made sketches of Hallam and his mother, Hallam appearing in the illustration to ' Dora.' " There were talks with Millais " as to the limits of realism in painting." My father hated the modem realism in painting and literature, notably as shown by the French schools. With regard to certain English pictures he said to Millais that from his point of view, "if you
^ My father wrote the first stanza of a song entitled '' The Alma River,^ which my mother finished and set to music :
Frenchman, a hand in thine!
Our flags have waved together! Let us drink to the health of thine and mine
At the battle of Alma River.
Our flags together furPd,
Henceforward no other strife — Than which of us most shall help the worldy
Which lead the noblest life.
Then pledge we our glorious dead,
Swear to be one for ever, And God^s best blessing on each dear head
That rests by the Alma River.
* Perhaps this suggested his fine early picture upon the subject.
1864] "THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE." 38 1
have human beings before a wall, the wall ought to be picturesquely painted, and in harmony with the idea pervading the picture, but must not be made obtrusive by the bricks being too minutely drawn, since it is the human beings that ought to have the real interest for us in a dramatic picture."
When Millais left, my parents read together Sou- vestre's account of the Bretons. The fact that their most popular songs are religious and that, when the cholera was among them, they would not listen to the doctors until they put their advice in song, set to national airs, struck my father. On Dec. 2nd he wrote " The Charge of the Light Brigade^" in a few minutes, after reading the description in the Times in which occurred the phrase " some one had blundered," and this was the origin of the metre of his poem. Christmas Eve is kept by his " blowing bubbles for the children, and making fun for them by humping up his shoulders high, and pretending to be a giant."
At the end of the year he received Professor Ferrier's History of Philosophy^ with the following letter :
St Andrews, Dec. 17M, 1854. Dear Sir,
You were among the very first to whom my book was to be sent and I supposed that you had received it some six weeks ago. Possibly Blackwood did not know your address and therefore sent it to your publisher.
If anything strikes you as inconsecutive in the reasoning you will do me a favour by pointing it out
One eminent authority has given it as his opinion that there is a non sequitur in the passage from Prop. I. to Prop. II. To me this seems odd. I esteem it a high honour to have now made your acquaintance and a great privilege to be allowed to
subscribe myself
Very truly yours, F. Ferrier.
^ Published in the Examiner^ Dec. 9th.
382 FARRINGFORD. [l864
Frederick Tennyson wrote from Florence :
Dec. ^oth^ 1854* My dear K and A.,
Browning comes in occasionally, but poor Mrs B. never stirs out during the winter. Under the rose, they are both preparing new poems, Browning a batch of Lyrics which are to be the real thing, Mrs B. a kind of Metrical Romance. Though I have the highest esteem for Browning, and believe him to be a man of infinite learning, jest and bonhommie, and moreover a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness, I verily believe his school of poetry to be the most grotesque conceivable. With the exception of the " Blot on the 'Scutcheon," through which you may possibly grope your way without the aid of an Ariadne, the rest appear to me to be Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities. Yet he has a very Catholic taste in poetry, doing justice to everything good in all poets past or present, and he is one who has a profound admira- tion of Alfred. I hear from Palgrave that A. has a new poem on the stocks ; a few of the best stanzas in your next letter I should prize highly, and the Brownings would be delighted to see a specimen of it I suppose the poem on the " Charge of the Six Hundred " in the Examiner^ signed A. T., is really by Alfred. Browning sent me the paper but I could give him no informa- tion on the subject
Your aflfectionate brother, F. Tennyson.
On Jan. loth, 1855, my father had "finished, and read out, several lyrics of * Maud/ *' The weather in January and February was arctic and the waves froze on the beach.
The news of the loss of Sir John Franklin, my mother's uncle, in the Arctic Regions was at this time " a great shock \'* It is interesting to note that Dr Kane, who was on the second Grinnell Expedition in search erf Sir John, honoured my father by naming a natural rock
^ My mother thought that her unde^s last words to her were : ^ If I am lost, remember, Emily, my firm belief that there is open sea at the North Pole."
1866] "Tennyson's monument." 383
column 480 feet high, on a pedestal 280 feet high, to the north of latitude 79 degrees, " Tennyson's Monument." Dr Kane wrote :
I remember well the emotions of my party as it first broke upon our view. Cold and sick as I was, I brought back a sketch of it, which may have interest for the reader, though it scarcely suggests the imposing dignity of this magnificent landmark. Those who are happily familiar with the writings of Tennyson and have communed with his spirit in the wilderness, will appre- hend the impulse that inscribed the scene with his name.
In February my father " translated aloud three Idylls of Theocritus, Hylas^ The Island of Cos^ and The Syra- cusan Women'' In March " Woolner made a medallion of him (the best likeness that had yet been made)."
On March 22nd my father received this letter from
Ruskin :
Denmark Hill, Camberwell,
2istMarchy 1855. Dear Mr Tennyson,
I venture to write to you, because as I was talking about you with Mr Woolner yesterday, he gave me more plea- sure than I can express by telling me that you wished to see my " Turners."
By several untoward chances I have been too long hindered from telling you face to face how much I owe you. So you see at last I seize the wheel of fortune by its nearest spoke, begging you with the heartiest entreaty I can, to tell me when you are likely to be in London and to fix a day if possible that I may keep it wholly for you, and prepare my " Turners " to look their rosiest and best. Capricious they are as enchanted opals, but they must surely shine for you.
Any day will do for me if you give me notice two or three days before, but please come soon, for I have much to say to you and am eager to say it, above all to tell you how for a thousand things I am gratefully and respectfully yours,
J. Ruskin.
In April my father walked to Bonchurch, and wrote to my mother : " If I stop another day here, I may have
384 FARRINGFORD. [l8»
a chance of seeing double stars thro' a telescope of Dr Mann's, a very clever interesting doctor with whom I spent two hours this morning. He showed me things thro' his microscope."
He was home again on April 25th, and "copied out * Maud ' for the press, and read * The Lady of the Lake,' having just finished Goethe's * Helena.' "
On June 6th he writes : " I have strangely enough accepted the Oxford Doctorship. Friends told me I ought to accept it, so I did." Temple ^ had suggested my father for that degree. My parents stayed at Balliol ; and my father said, as he sat in the Balliol gardens, " The shouts of the Undergraduates from the theatre are like the shouts of the Roman crowd, *Christiani ad Leones!'" He was very nervous before going, but entered the theatre quite calmly with Sir John Burgoyne, the stately-looking Montalembert, and Sir de Lacy Evans. He sat on the steps nearly under Lord Derby, then there was one great shout for "In Memoriam," one for "Alma" and one for " Inkermann." The sea of upturned faces was very striking, and my father had a " tremendous ovation" when he received his degree. The new doctor ordinarily borrows a doctor's robes from a tailor and just wears them in the Sheldonian Theatre for the ceremony. But my father after luncheon asked the Master of Balliol whether it would be against rule and propriety if he might have a smoke, as it was his fancy to do so, among the green trees when clad in his red doctorial robes. The Master said that he might do so, and he smoked in the then walled-in Master's garden, now open to the college. "In the evening at Magdalen he had long talks with Mr Gladstone and Montalembert." Next day Arthur Butler and Max Miiller took my father and mother about Oxford, and to the Bodleian, to see the
1 Now Archbishop of Canterbury.
1856] FRENCH TRANSLATIONS. 385
Illuminated Missals, and Dr Wellesley showed them the RaflFaelle sketches. At night they had tea with Professor Johnson and Professor Adams, and looked at the Nebulae in Cassiopeia through the big telescope, the Ring Nebula in Lyra and also some double stars.
On July 7th they reached home, and the last touch was put to " Maud," before giving it to the publisher. Up to the time of my father's death, when his friends asked him to read aloud from his own poetry, he generally chose " Maud," the " Ode on the Duke of Wellington," or " Guinevere."
Translations into French of " Ring out, wild bells," and " Mariana in the Moated Grange," were sent him from France.
He pointed out "what a poor language French is for translating English poetry, although it is the best language for delicate nuances of meaning. How absurd * Ring out, wild bells ' sounds in the translation ' Sonnez, Cloches, Sonnez,' and what a ridiculous rendering of * He Cometh not, she said ' is ' Tom ne vient pas ' ! ^ "
August 6th. " The Balaclava Charge " with the fol- lowing short preface was forwarded to John Forster to be printed on a fly-leaf for the Crimean Soldiers.
^ About this time he wrote a letter to the Breton poet Hippoljrte Lucas : Une Lettre inidite d^ Alfred Tennyson h Hippolyte Lucas,
Cher Monsieur,
Ce m^est v^ritablement une douce chose que d^avoir trouvd- une ftme po^tique qui puisse fratemiser avec la mienne de Pautre c6t^ de la grande mer. Les pontes, comme vous le dites fort bien, sont ou plut6t devraient toe relics ensemble par une chalne ^ectrique, car lis ne doivent pas parler seulement pour leurs compatriotes. J^ai lu vos vers plusieurs fbis, et lis m^ont caus^ plus de plaisir k chaque nouvelle lecture. Je suis particuli^rement flatt^ de leur ressemblance avec mon propre po^me.
Si jamais je fais un voyage en Bretagne, j^aurai Thonneur et le plaisir de vous faire une visite. Votre province est riche en l^gendes po^tiques de toute esp^ce, et par cela m^me particuli^rement ch^e aux Anglais. J^esp^re la voir un jour, et vous en m^me temps.
En attendant, croyez-moi, cher monsieur, votre tout d^voud
Alfred Tennyson.
T. L 25
386 FARRINGFORD. [1866
August Sfk, 1855.
Having heard that the brave soldiers before Sebas- topol, whom I am proud to call my countrymen, have a liking for my ballad on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, I have ordered a thousand copies of it to be printed for them. No writing of mine can add to the glory they have acquired in the Crimea ; but if what I have heard be true they will not be displeased to receive these copies from me, and to know that those who sit at home love and honour them.
Alfred Tennyson. To John Forster.
\Undated.'\
Mv DEAR Forster,
In the first place thanks for your critique which seems to me good and judicious. Many thanks, my wife will write to you about it ; but what I am writing to you now about is a matter which interests me very much. My friend Chapman of 3, Stone Building^s, Lincoln's Inn, writes to me thus: — "An acquaintance of mine in the department of the S.P.G. as he calls it (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) was saying how a chaplain in the Crimea sent by the Society writes to the Society — (neither he nor the Society being suspected of any Tennysonian prejudices) — * T\it, greatest service you can do ^ just now is to send out on printed slips Mr A. T.'s * Charge at Balaclava.' It is the greatest favourite of the soldiers — half are singing it, and all want to have it in black and white, so as to read what has so taken them.*"
Now, my dear Forster, you see I cannot possibly be deaf to such an appeal. I wish to send out about 1000 slips, and I don't at all want the S.P.G. or any one to
^ Thus underscored in the original.
1856] LETTERS ABOUT THE "CHARGE." 387
send out the version last printed: it would, I believe,
quite disappoint the soldiers. Don't you live quite close
to the S.P.G. ? Could you not send Henry over to say
that / am sending over the soldiers' version of my ballad,
and beg them not to stir in the matter ? The soldiers
are the best critics in what pleases them. I send you
a copy which retains the ** Light Brigade," and the
"blunder'd"; and I declare it is the best of the two,
and that the criticism of two or three London friends (not
yours) induced me to spoil it For Heaven's sake get
this copy fairly printed at once, and sent out. I have sent
it by this post likewise to Moxon, but you are closer to
your printer. Concoct with him how it is all to be
managed : I am so sorry that I am not in town to have
done it at once. I have written a little note to the
soldiers which need not be sent — just as you like. It
might be merely printed " From A. Tennyson." Please
see to all this : and see that there are no mistakes ; and
I will be bound to you for evermore, and more than ever
yours in great haste,
A. Tennyson.
P.S. I am convinced now after writing it out that this is the best version.
The following tribute was received from Scutari :
We had in hospital a man of the Light Brigade, one of the few who survived that fatal mistake, the Balaclava charge ; but which, deplorable as it was, at least tended to show the high state of discipline attained in the British army. I spoke to several of those engaged in that deadly conflict, and they could describe accurately the position of the Russian cannon ; were perfectly aware when obeying that word of command, that they rode to almost certain death. This patient had received a kick in the chest from a horse long after the battle of Balaclava, while in barracks at Scutari. He was depressed in spirits, which prevented him from throwing off the disease engendered by the blow. The doctor remarked that he wished the soldier could be
25 — a
388 FARRINGFORD. [I866
roused. Amongst other remedies leeches were prescribed. While watching them I tried to enter into a conversation with him, spoke of the charge, but could elicit only monosyllabic replies. A copy of Tennyson's poems having been lent me that morning, I took it out and read it. The man, with kindling eye, at once entered upon a spirited description of the fatal gallop between the gims' mouths to and from that cannon- crowded height. He asked to hear it ag^in, but, as by this time a number of convalescents were gathered around, I slipped out of the ward. The chaplain who had lent me the poem, under- standing the enthusiasm with which it had been received, afterwards procured from England a number of copies for distribution. In a few days the invalid requested the doctor to discharge him for duty, being now in health ; but whether the cure was effected by the leeches or the poem it is impossible to say. On giving the card the medical man murmured, " Well done, Tennyson ! "
On one of the anniversaries of the Balaclava charge a banquet was given in London, and my father was pressed to attend. Being unable to do so, he sent the following letter to the chairman of the committee :
Farringford, Freshwater.
Dear Sir,
I cannot attend your banquet, but I enclose £S to defray some of its expenses, or to be distributed as you may think fit among the most indigent of the survivors of that glorious charge. A blunder it may have been, but one for which England should be grateful, having thereby learnt that her soldiers are the most honest and most obedient under the sun. I will drink a cup of wine on the 25th to the health and long life of all your fine fellows ; and, thanking yourself and your comrades heartily for the cordial invitation sent me, I pray you all to believe me, now and ever, your admiring fellow-countryman,
A. Tennyson.
1856] DEATH OF HARRY LUSHINGTON. 389
He had intended to write a poem on the soldiers' battle of Inkermann, but only got as far as the first line: "Strong eight thousand of Inkermann."
At this time my father's friend Harry Lushington, who with his brother Franklin had published some stirring poems on the Crimean war, died in Paris.
My fathet^s letter-diary of days in the New Forest.
August ^ist. Haven't had the heart to get further than Winchester and Salisbury. I am going to-day to take a gig across country to Lyndhurst.
Lyndhurst^ Sept. ist. Tho' I had said that the New Forest, for didn't I expect that it was disforested, would not do again ; tho', when I started this morning, I got on the wrong track for four miles or so out of the way of the great timber; the vast solemn beeches delighted me, but my soul was not satisfied, for I did not meet with any so very large beech as I had met with before. Yet I rejoiced in the beeches and have resolved to stay till Monday and see them twice again. I have lost the tobacco case which Simeon gave me; I am grieved, but it was so like the colour of last year's beech leaves that I did not see it when I turned to leave the spot where I had smoked.
Crown Hotely Lyndhurst. Sept. 2nd. I lost my way in the Forest to-day, and have walked I don't know how many miles. I found a way back to Lyndhurst by resolutely following a track which brought me at last to a turnpike. On this I went a mile in the wrong direction, that is towards Christchurch, then met a surly fellow who grudgingly told me I was four miles from Lyndhurst, whereby I turned and walked to Lyndhurst. My admiration of the Forest is great : it is true old wild English Nature, and then the fresh heath-sweetened air is so delicious. The Forest is grand.
390 FARRINGFORD. [l855
Londofiy Sept. 28M. I dined yesterday with the Brownings and had a very pleasant evening. Both of them are great admirers of poor little ** Maud." The two Rossettis came in during the evening \
October ist. I dined at Twickenham, my mother looking very well and intending to keep the house on another year. I also dined with the Camerons last night, she is more wonderful than ever I think in her wild-beaming benevolence. I read " Maud " to five or six people at the Brownings (on Sept. 28th).
Mrs Browning writes thereupon to my mother:
13 Dorset Street, October^ 1^55- My dear Mrs Tennyson,
If I had not received your kindest of letters I had yet made up my mind not to leave England without writing to you to thank you (surely it would have been your due) for the deep pleasure we had in Mr Tennyson's visit to us. He didn't come back as he said he would to teach me the " Brook " (which I persist nevertheless in fancying I imderstand a little), but he did so much and left such a voice (both him " and a voice ! ") crying out " Maud " to us, and helping the effect of the poem by the personality, that it's an increase of joy and life to us ever. Then may we not venture to think now of Alfred Tennyson our friend ? and was it not worth while coming from Italy to Eng- land for so much ? Let me say too another thing, that though I was hindered (through having women friends with me, whom I loved and yet could not help wishing a little further just then) from sitting in the smoke and hearing the talk of the next room, yet I heard some sentences which, in this materialistic low-talking world, it was comfort and triumph to hear from the lips of such a man. So I thank you both, and my husband's thanks go with mine.
As to a visit to you, how pleasant that you should ask us !
^ Gabriel Rossetti wrote to William AUingham about this evening in an unpublished letter: ''He is quite as glorious in his way as Browning in his, and perhaps of the two even more impressive on the whole personaUy.*^
1866] LETTER FROM MRS BROWNING. 39 1
This year we could not have gone, next year perhaps we shall not be able any more * ♦ ♦ but every year of our lives it will be pleasant to think that you have wished it. Dear Mrs Tennyson, you do not mind the foolish remarks on " Maud " * * * do you ? These things are but signs of an advance made, of the tide rising. People on the shore are troubled in their picking up of shells a little.
Kiss your children for me : I hope my child may play with them before long. My husband's " Men and Women " shall go to Mr Tennyson on the publication, not to trouble him (understand) with exaction of a letter or opinion, but simply as a sign of personal regard and respect.
Dear Mrs Tennyson and dear Mr Tennyson, believe us both very affectionately yours, though I have but the name of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
P.S. (We leave England to-morrow.) God bless you, dear and admirable friends. My wife feels what she says, and I feel with her.
Affectionately yours,
Robert Browning.
On his return the evening books were Milton, Shakespeare's Sonnets^ Thackeray's Humourists^ some of Hallam's History and of Carlyle's Cromwell.
This Christmas " Mr. Lear paid us a visit and sang his settings of * Mariana,' * Lotos-Eaters,' ' Let not the solid earth,' and *Oh that 'twere possible.'"
One day my father received "an interesting letter telling him of a man who had been roused from a state of suicidal despondency by ' The Two Voices.' "
At the end of the year an unknown Nottingham artizan came to call. My father asked him to dinner and at his request read " Maud." It appears that the poor man had sent his poems beforehand. They had been acknowledged, but had not been returned, and had been forgotten. He was informed that the poems,
392 FARRINGFORD. [l865
thus sent, were always looked at, although my father and mother had not time to pass judgment on them. A most pathetic incident of this kind, my father told me, happened to him at Twickenham, when a Waterloo soldier brought twelve large cantos on the battle of Waterloo. The veteran had actually taught himself in his old age to read and write that he might thus commemorate Wellington's great victory. The epic lay for some time under the sofa in my father's study, and was a source of much anxiety to him. How could he go through such a vast poem ? One day he mustered up courage and took a portion out. It opened on the heading of a canto : " The Angels encamped above the field of Waterloo." On that day, at least, he " read no more." He gave the author, when he called for his manuscript, this criticism : " Though great images loom here and there, your poem could not be published as a whole." The old man answered nothing, wrapt up each of the twelve cantos carefully, placed them in a strong oak case and carried them ofiE. He was asked to come again but he never came.
1^ Kri- Hjl /rLU, ftrvy%^ ^ofrU -n^y ^Jjfi^ /i^ fruA^
Jt4As^ du^ tr-y^.^ wlOf cov-t ^v«^, J'toh, u^ ^T>i*-1 t»/TO^ 6^71^^^ I'y^ULM^
Frow ri>^ Original MS.
394 " MAUD." [l856
action. He generally prefaced his reading with an eiq>lanation, the substance oi which has been given by Dr Mann in his Maud VindicaUd.
^ "^At the opening of the drama, the chief person or hero ctf the action is introduced with scenery and incidents artistically disposed around his figure, so as to make the reader at once acquainted with certain facts in his history, which it is essential should be known. Although still a young man, he has lost his father some years before by a sudden and violent death, following immediately upon unforeseen ruin brought about by an unfortunate speculation in which the deceased had engaged. Whether the death was the result of accident, or self-inflicted in a moment of despair, no one knows, but the son's mind has been painfully possessed by a suspicion of villainy and foul play somewhere, because an old friend of his family became suddenly and unaccountably rich by the same transaction that had brought ruin to the dead. Shortly after the decease of his father, the bereaved young man, by the death of his mother, is left quite alone in the world. He continues thenceforth to reside in the retired village in which his early days have been spent, but the sad experiences of his youth have confirmed the bent of a mind constitutionally prone to depression and melancholy. Brooding in loneliness upon miserable memories and bitter fancies, his temperament as a matter of course becomes more and more morbid and irritable. He can see nothing in human affairs that does not awaken in him disgust and contempt. Evil glares out from all social arrangements, and unqualified meanness and selfishness appear in every human form, so he keeps to himself and chews the cud of cynicism and discontent apart from his kind. Such in rough outline is the figure the poet has sketched as the foundation and centre of his
^ My £&ther desired that the passage by Dr Mann, here quoted, should be inserted among his notes 1891-92.
1866] LAST READING OF THE POEM. 395
plan * * *. Since the days of his early youth up to the period when the immediate action of the poem is supposed to commence, the dreamy recluse has seen nothing of the family of the man to whom circumstances have inclined him to attribute his misfortunes. This individual, although since his accession to prosperity the possessor of the neighbouring hall and of the manorial lands of the village, has been residing abroad. Just at this time however there are workmen up at the dark old place, and a rumour spreads that the absentees are about to return. This rumour, as a matter of course, stirs up afresh rankling memories in the breast of the recluse, and awakens there old griefs. But with the group of associated recollections that come crowding forth, there is one of the child Maud, who was in happier days his merry playfellow. She will now however be a child no longer. She will return as the lady mistress of the mansion (being the only daughter of the Squire, who is a widower). What will she be like? He, who wonders, has heard somewhere that she is singularly beautiful. But what is this to him? Even while he thinks of her, he feels a chill presentiment, suggested no doubt by her close relationship to one who he considered had already worked him so much harm, that she will bring with her a curse for him."
I shall never forget his last reading ^ of " Maud," on August 24th, 1892. He was sitting in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over the groves and yellow cornfields of Sussex toward the long line of South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable of delicate and manifold inflection, but with
^ He owned that '< Some of the passages are hard to read because they have to be taken in one breath and require good lungs.**
396 " MAUD." [I866
"organ-tones" of great power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem. You were at once put in sympathy with the hero. As he said himself, " This poem is a little Hamlet^^ the history of a morbid poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age. He is the heir of madness, an egotist with the makings of a cynic, raised to sanity by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and, when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness bom of his great passion. My father pointed out that even Nature at first presented herself to the man in sad visions.
And the flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove thro' the air.
The " blood-red heath " too is an exaggeration of colour ; and his suspicion that all the world is against him is as true to his nature as the mood when he is " fantastically merry." " The peculiarity of this poem," my father added, " is that difiEerent phases of passion in one person take the place of difiEerent characters."
The passion in the first Canto was given by my father in a sort of rushing recitative through the long sweeping lines of satire and invective against the greed for money, and of horror at the consequences of the war of the hearth.
Then comes the first sight of Maud, and "visions of the night," and in Canto iv. a longing for calm, the reaction after a mood of bitterness, and yearning for
A philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways.
1866] READING OF THE POEM. 397
But the clarion call of the " voice by the cedar tree " singing
A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
awakens a love in the heart which revolutionizes and inspires the whole life. In Canto xi. my father ex- pressed the longing for love in
O let the solid ground Not fail beneath my feet:
in Canto xvn. the exultation of love, knowing that it is returned :
Go not, happy day,
From the shining fields.
But this blessedness is so intense that it borders on sadness, and my father's voice would break down when he came to
I have led her home, my love, my only friend. There is none like her, none.
Joy culminates in "Come into the garden, Maud," and my father's eyes, which were through the other love- passages veiled by his drooping lids, would suddenly flash as he looked up and spoke these words, the passion in his voice deepening in the last words of the stanza.
She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread. My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet.
And blossom in purple and red.
398 " MAUD." [I8W
Then we heard after the duel the terrible wail of agony and despair in
The fault was mine,
and the depth of forlorn misery in
Courage, poor heart of stone!
when the man feels that he is going mad, both read with slow solemnity : then the delirious madness of
O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?
The lyrics in "Maud" which my father himself liked best were
I have led her home,
and O that 'twere possible,
and Courage, poor heart of stone!
About the mad-scene one of the best-known doctors for the insane wrote that it was "the most faithful representation of madness since Shakespeare."
It is notable that two such appreciative critics as Mr Gladstone and Dr Van Dyke wholly misapprehended the meaning of " Maud " until they heard my father read it, and that they both then publicly recanted their first criticisms. " No one but a noble-minded man would have done that " my father would say of Mr Gladstone. Dr Van Dyke's recantation he did not live to read \
Mr Gladstone's recantation runs thus :
I can now see, and I at once confess, that a feeling, which had reference to the growth of the war-spirit in the outer world at the date of this article {Quarterly Review^ 1855), dislocated my
^ When Fanny Kemble heard that my £&ther read his ^ Maud ^ finelyy she wrote : '' I do not think any reading of Tennyson^s can ever be as striking and impressive as that ' Curse of Boadicea * that he intoned to us, while the oak trees were writhing in the storm that lashed the windows and swept ovtr Blackdown the da.7 we were there." (Unpublished MS.)
1866] Gladstone's misapprehension. 399
frame of mind, and disabled me from dealing even tolerably with the work as a work of imagination. Whether it is to be desired that a poem should require from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it; whether all that is put into the mouth of the Soliloquist in " Maud " is within the lines of poetical verisimilitude, whether this poem has the full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the sister- works; are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of detail, nor to its g^eat lyrical and metrical power. And what is worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between particular passages in the poem and its general scope. This is, I conceive, not to set forth any coherent strain, but to use for poetical ends all the moods and phases allowable under the laws of the art, in a special form of character, which is impassioned, fluctuating and ill-grounded. The design, which seems to resemble that of the Ecclesiastes in another sphere, is arduous ; but Mr Tennyson's power of execution is probably nowhere greater. Even as regards the passages devoted to war-frenzy, equity should have reminded me of the fine lines in the latter portion of x. 3 (Part i), and of the emphatic words V. 10 (Part n) :
I swear to you, lawful and lawless war Are scarcely even akin.
W. E. G. 1878 1.
Among the few who recognized merit in " Maud " were Henry Taylor, Jowett and the Brownings.
From Henry Taylor.
Colonial Ofhce, Londok, Zistjufy, 1855. My dear Tennyson,
I thank you much for sending me " Maud." I have only read it twice, but I have already a strong feeling of what it is. I say a feeling and not an opinion, for I am always disposed to have as little as possible to say to opinions in matters poetical.
^ Gladstone's GUanings, Vol. n.
4CX> " MAUD." [I866
I felt the passion of it and the poetic spirit that is in it, and the poetic spirit that it seemed in some measure to bring back unto me. I am glad that there is some one living who can do me that service and glad that you are he.
Ever yours sincerely, H. Taylor.
In December Jowett writes:
I want to tell you how greatly I admire " Maud." No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature. No modem poem contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse out of Shakespeare in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height.
He adds that the critics have "confused the hero with the author \"
Some of the reviews accused him of loving war,
^ I take from Dr Mann, with some condensation, the following reroarics about '^Maud,^ because in the light of present criticism they are curious. ''One member of the fraternity of critics immediately pronounced the poem to be a 'spasm,^ another acutely discovered that it was a 'careless, visionary, and unreal allegory of the Russian War.^ A third could not quite make up his mind whether the adjective 'mud^ or 'mad^ would best apply to the work, but thought, as there was only one smaU vowel redundant in the title in either case, both might do. A fourth found that the *mud^ concealed < irony ^; and the fifth, leaning rather to the mad h3rpothesis, nevertheless held that the madness was only assumed as an excuse for pitching the tone of the poetry in *a key of extravagant sensibility/ Others of the multifold judgments were of opinion that it was ^a political fever,^ an ^epidemic caught from the prevalent care- lessness of thought and rambling contemplativeness of the time ^ ; ' obscurity mistaken for profundity,^ 'the dead level of prose run mad.^; 'absurdity such as even partial friendship must blush to tolerate,' 'rampant and rabid bloodthirstiness of soul.' These are but a few of the pleasant suggestions which critical acumen brought forward as its explanations of the inspiration of numbers that must nevertheless be musical.''
Maud Vindicated.
One of the anonymous letters my £&ther received he enjoyed repeating with a humorous intonation :
Sir, I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast I So you've taken to imitating Longfellow.
Yours in aversion ♦ ♦ ♦.
186o] HIS OPINIONS ON WAR. 4OI
and urging the country to war, charges which he sufficiently answered in the "Epilogue to the Heavy Brigade," ending with these lines:
And here the singer for his Art
Not all in vain may plead. The song that nerves a nation's heart
Is in itself a deed.
The truth is that though he advocated the war of defence and of liberty, and often said, " Peace at all price implies war at all cost," no one loathed war more than he did, or looked forward more passionately to the
Parliament of man, the Federation of the world,
when the earth at last should be one.
A warless world, a single race, a single tongue, I have seen her far away, for is not Earth as yet so
young ? Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion
kiird, Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd, Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she
smiles. Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles^..
What even his hero in " Maud " says is only that the sins of the nation, " civil war " as he calls them, are deadlier in their effect than what is commonly called war, and that they may be in a measure subdued by the war between nations which is an evil more easily recognized.
At first my father was nettled by these captious re- marks of the " indolent reviewers," but afterwards would take no notice of them, except to speak of them in a half -pitiful, half -humorous, half-mournful manner. About
^ This line he held to be one of the best of the kind he had ever written.
T.I. ^
402 " MAUD." [1866
" Maud " and other monodramatic poems (the stories of which were his own creation) he said to me: " In a certain way^ no doubt, poets and novelists, however dramatic they are, give themselves in their works. The mistake that people make is that they think the poet's poems are a kind of * catalogue raisonn^ ' of his very own self, and of all the facts of his life, not seeing that they often only express a poetic instinct, or judgment on character real or imagined, and on the facts of lives real or imagined. Of course some poems, like my ' Ode to Memory,' are evidently based on the poet's own nature, and on hints from his own life."
The poem was first entitled " Maud or the Madness." My father thought that part of the misunderstanding of " Maud " had arisen from a misconception of the story, so left me the following MS headings and notes.
Part I.
Sections
I. Before the arrival of Maud. II. First sight of Maud.
III. Visions of the night. The broad-flung ship-
wrecking roar. In the Isle of Wight the roar can be heard nine miles away from the beach. (Many of the descriptions of Nature are taken from observations of natural phe- nomena at Farringford, although the localities in the poem are all imaginary.)
IV. Mood of bitterness after fancied disdain. V. He fights against his growing passion.
VI. First interview with Maud.
1866] NOTES ON THE POEM. 4O3
VII. He remembers his own and her father talking just before the birth of Maud.
VIII. That she did not return his love.
IX. First sight of the young lord.
X. The Westminster Review said this was an attack on John Bright. I did not know at the time that he was a Quaker. (It was not against Quakers but against peace-at-all-price men that the hero fulminates.)
XI. This was originally verse iii. but I omitted it.
Will she smile if he presses her hand, This lord-captain up at the Hall? Captain! he to hold a command! He can hold a cue, he can pocket a ball; And sure not a bantam cockerel lives With a weaker crow upon English land. Whether he boast of a horse that gains. Or cackle his own applause....
What use for a single mouth to rage At the rotten creak of the State-machine; Tho' it makes friends weep and enemies smile, That here in the face of a watchful age. The sons of a gray-beard-ridden isle Should dance in a round of an old routine.
XII. Interview with Maud.
"Maud, Maud, Maud" is like the rook's caw. " Maud is here, here, here " is like the call of the little birds.
XIII. Mainly prophetic. He sees Maud's brother who will not recognize him.
XVI. He will declare his love.
404 "MAUD." [l865
XVII. Accepted.
XVIII. Happy. The sigh in the cedar branches seenis
to chime in with his own yearning.
^^Sad astrology " is modem astronomy, for of old astrology was thought to sympathize with and rule man*s fate.
Not die but live a life of truest breath. This is the central idea, the holy power of Love.
XXL Before the Ball. XXII. In the Hall-Garden.
Part IL
Sections
L The Phantom (after the duel with Maud's
brother).
IL In Brittany. The shell undestroyed amid the storm perhaps S5rmbolizes to him his own first and highest nature preserved amid the storms of passion.
III. He felt himself going mad.
IV. Haunted after Maud's death.
" O that 'twere possible " appeared first in the Keepsake. Sir John Simeon years after begged me to weave a story round this poem and so " Maud " came into being.
V. In the mad-house.
The second corpse is Maud's brother, the lover's father being the first corpse, whom the lover thinks that Maud's father has murdered.
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1866] LETTERS ABOUT "MAUD." 405
Part III.
VI. Sane but shattered. Written when the cannon was heard booming from the battle-ships in the Solent before the Crimean War.
Letters to and from friends^ 1854-55.
To Gerald Massey.
Freshwater, I. of Wight, April isif 1854.
My dear Sir,
In consequence of my change of residence I did not receive your captivating volume till yesterday. I am no reader of papers and Reviews and I had not seen, nor even heard of any of your poems : my joy was all the fresher and the greater in thus suddenly coming on a poet of such fine lyrical impulse, and of so rich half-oriental an imagination. It must be granted that you make our good old English tongue crack and sweat for it occasionally, but time will chasten all that. Go on and prosper, and believe me grateful for your gift, and
Yours most truly, A. Tennyson.
Letters to Dr Mann^ author of ''Maud Vindicated^
1855.
Thanks for your Vindication. No one with this essay before him can in future pretend to misunderstand my dramatic poem, " Maud " : your commentary is as true as it is full, and I am really obliged to you for defending me against the egregiously nonsensical im- putation of having attacked the Quakers or Mr Bright: you are not aware, perhaps, that another wiseacre ac- cused me of calling Mr Layard an "Assyrian Bull I "
Yours very truly, A. Tennyson.
406 LETTERS ABOUT "MAUD," ETC. [l865
Without the prestige of Shakespeare, Hamlet (if
it came out now) would be treated in just the same
way, so that one ought not to care for their cackling,
not that I am comparing poor little " Maud " to the
Prince, except as, what's the old quotation out of Virgil,
sic parvis componerCy etc. Would it not be better that
all literary criticisms should be signed with the name or
at least the initials of the writer? To sign political
articles would be perhaps unadvisable and inconvenient,
but my opinion is that we shall never have a good school
of criticism in England while the writer is anonymous
and irresponsible.
Believe me yours ever, A. T.
I am delighted with Miss Sewell's giftS tho' yet unseen. I should like as I have told her to learn some- thing of the history of the naming of it: can you tell me anything ? Please get it framed, we shall be half a year getting it done here. I think it should not have a great white margin except the artist herself desires it Perhaps the lake was not called after your humble servant but another. I enclose you the note to Miss Sewell which please deliver and read if you choose.
A. T.
I wished for you much yesterday. Merwood * brought
me a lump of snake's eggs, and I picked carefully out
two little embryo snakes with bolting eyes and beating
hearts. I laid them on a piece of white paper. Their
hearts or blood-vessels beat for at least two hours after
extraction. Does not that in some way explain why
it is so very difficult to kill a snake? I was so sorry
not to have you and your microscope here.
A. T.
^ Miss Sewell had painted a picture of Lake Tenn3rsoii in New Zealand^ so named by Sir Frederick Weld. ' Tenant at Farringford farm.
1866] LETTER FROM NEW SOUTH WALES. 407
From Mrs Vyner^ a stranger^.
River, New South Wales, 1855. Dear Friend,
I know that the poet's life must have its common- place daily sorrows and toils and that there must be moments when he even doubts his own gift, but I fancy a poet's heart must be so large and loving that he can feel for and forgive even folly. Folly it may be, and yet I must write and thank you with a true and grateful heart for the happy moments your thoughts and your pen have given me. I am in the wildest bush of Australia, far away from all that makes life beautiful and endurable excepting the strong and stem sense of duty, the consciousness that where God has placed us is our lot to be, and that our most becoming posture is to accept our destiny with grateful humility. You must let me tell you how in a lonely home among the mountains, with my young children asleep, my husband absent, no sound to be heard but the cry of the wild dog or the wail of the curlew, no lock or bolt to guard our soli- tary hut, strong in our utter helplessness I have turned (next to God's book) to you as a friend, and read far into the night till my lot seemed light and a joy seemed cast around ray very menial toils : then I have said, " God bless the poet and put still some beautiful words and thoughts into his heart," and the burthen of life became pleasant to me or at least easy. If you are the man I feel you must be you will forgive this address : there are certain impulses which seem irresistible, and I believe these are the genuine, truthful moments of our life, and such an impulse has urged me to write to you, and I know that the blessing of a faithful heart cannot be bootless : and may He who seeth not as man seeth spare you to plead the cause of truth and to spurn foolish saws and sickly conventionalities. Farewell.
God bless you : always your friend, Margaret Anna Vyner.
My father's aunt Mrs Russell was vexed at what she thought an attack on coal-mine owners in " Maud,"
^ My father was deeply touched by this letter : and kept it among the things he most prized.
4cS Lcmas jiboct '^macuT etc [:
and so be vrites : " I rcallj cocld find it in my heart to be ofiFexided with such an impotatiofu for what most joa think of me if jog think me cs^iable ai such grataitoas and immeaning persanaHtT and hosdlitj? I am as sensitive a person as exists, and sooner than woond anyone in soch a spitefiil fashion, woold consent never to write a line again ; yea. to have my hand cut off at the wrisL Wliy, if yon had the least suspicion that I had acted in this way, did you not inquire of me before? Now see, y€>u the kindliest and tenderest of human beings, how you have wronged me, and cherished in your heart this accusation as baseless, no, more baseless, than a dream, for dreams have some better foundation in past things: but pray put it all out oi your head."
To George BrimUy.
FussawATER, I. W. Niw. 28M, 1855.
S1R9
I wish to assure you that I quite close vidth
your commentary on " MauA" I may have agreed with
portions of other critiques on the same poem, which have
been sent to me ; but when I saw your notice I laid my
finger upon it and said, " There, that is my meaning."
Poor little " Maud," after having run the gauntlet of so
much brainless abuse and anonymous spite, has found a
critic. Therefore believe her father (not the gray old
wolf) to be
Yours not unthankfully, A. Tennyson.
P.S. But there are two or three points in your comment to which I should take exception, e.g. " The writer of the fragments, etc.," surely the speaker or the thinker rather than the writer ; again, as to the character
1865] LETTER TO MR TUCKERMAN. 4O9
of the love, do any of the expressions "rapturous," " painful," " childish," however they may apply to some of the poems, fully characterize the 1 8th ? is it not something deeper? but perhaps some day I may discuss these things with you, and therefore I will say no more here, except that I shall be very glad to see you if ever you come to the Isle of Wight.
To F. G. Tuckerman.
1855. Dear Mr Tuckerman,
I have just returned home (i.e. to Farringford) from a visit to London, during which I called on Moxon, and found your kind present of books waiting for me. I fear that you must have thought me neglectful in not immediately acknowledging them : and so I should have done had I not been waiting to send along with my thanks a small volume of my own, containing some of the things I repeated to you in my little smoking-attic here. These poems, when printed, I found needed considerable elision and so the book has hung on hand. When I arrived here I found that my small smoking- room did not smell of smoke at all, nay was even fragrant. I could not at first make it out. At last I perceived it was owing to the Russian leather on your Webster which you made mine. Even so (as some one says),
" The actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust" —
and there was dust enough on the table almost to justify the application.
You will find in my little volume " The Charge of the Light Brigade." * * * * It is not a poem on which
4IO LETTERS ABOUT "MAUD," ETC. [1866
I pique myself, but I cannot help fancying that, such as it is, I have improved it.
Farewell and forgive my silence hitherto. I shall always remember with pleasure your coming to see me in the frost and our pleasant talk together. Did you see in your paper that the Oxford University would make me a Doctor the other day, and how the young men shouted ?
I am, dear Mr Tuckerman,
Ever yours, A. Tennyson.
To the Rev. G. G. Bradley^.
Farringford,
August 25/54, 1855,
Dear Mr Bradley,
Many thanks for the Arnold: nobody can deny that he is a poet. "The Merman" was an old favourite of mine, and I like him as well as ever. " The Scholar Gipsy " is quite new to me, and I have already an aflfection for him, which I think will increase. There are several others which seem very good, so that alto- gether I may say that you have conferred a great boon upon me. I have received a Scotch paper, in which it is stated that poor " Maud " is to be slashed all to pieces by that mighty man, that pompholygous, broad-blown ApoUodorus, the gifted X. Her best friends do not expect her to survive it!
I am yours very truly,
A. Tennyson.
^ Dean of Westminster.
1865] LETTERS FROM RUSKIN AND HERBERT SPENCER. 4II
From J. Rusktn.
Denmark Hnx, 12th November^ '^^SS* My dear Sir,
I hear of so many stupid and feelingless misunder- standings of " Maud " that I think it may perhaps give you some little pleasure to know my sincere admiration of it throughout.
I do not like its versification so well as much of your other work, not because I do not think it good of its kind, but because I do not think that wild kind quite so good, and I am sorry to have another cloud put into the sky of one's thoughts by the sad story, but as to the general bearing and delicate finish of the thing in its way, I think no admiration can be extravagant.
It is a compliment to myself, not to you, if I say that I think with you in all things about the war.
I am very sorry you put the " Some one had blundered " out of the "Light Brigade 1."
It was precisely the most tragical line in the poem. It is as true to its history as essential to its tragedy.
Believe me sincerely yours, J. Ruskin.
From Herbert Spencer {about ^'The Two Voices^').
7 Marlborough Gardens,
St John's Wood, London, 1855. Sir,
I happened recently to be re-reading your Poem "The Two Voices," and coming to the verse
Or if thro' lower lives I came — Tho* iall experience past became Consolidate in mind and frame —
it occurred to me that you might like to glance through a book which applies to the elucidation of mental science, the hypothesis to which you refer. I therefore beg your acceptance of Psychology which I send by this post
With much sympathy yours,
Herbert Spencer.
^ Some friends of excellent critical judgment prevailed upon him to omit this phrase which was however soon re-inserted: for it was originally the keynote of the poem.
412 THE PURCHASE OF FARRINGFORD. [l856
With the proceeds of the sale of " Maud " Farringford was bought, and my mother's journal says :
April 24M, 1856. This morning a letter came from Mr G. S. Venables saying that Mr Chapman pronounced the title of Farringford good. We have agreed to buy, so I suppose this ivied home among the pine-trees is ours. Went to our withy holt: such beautiful blue hyacinths, orchises, primroses, daisies, marsh-marigolds and cuckoo-flowers. Wild cherry trees too with single snowy blossom, and the hawthorns white with their " pearls of May." The park has for many days been rich with cowslips and furze in bloom. The elms are a golden wreath at the foot of the down ; to the north of the house the mespilus and horse-chestnut are in flower and the apple-trees are covered with rosy buds. A. dug the bed ready for the rhododendrons. A thrush was singing among the nightingales and other birds, as he said " mad with joy." At sunset, the golden green of the trees, the burning splendour of Blackgang Chine and St Catharine's, and the red bank of the primeval river, contrasted with the turkis-blue of the sea (that is our view from the drawing-room), make altogether a miracle of beauty. We are glad that Farringford is ours.
CHAPTER XX.
HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS OF THE KING."
1856-1859.
A thousand thanks for your charming letter from the Isle of Wight with suggestive date of Bonchurch (the only church you went to that day), and the spirited outline sketch of the Idyllic Poet serenely ploughing his windy acres. How must you have enjoyed!... The *' Idylls (of the King)" area brilliant success. Rich tapestries, wrought as only Tenn3rson could have done them, and worthy to hang by the Faerie Queen. I believe there is no discordant voice on this side of the water.
(From H. W. Longfellow to James T. Fields, 1854.)
1856.
My father went to the Grange (Lord Ashburton's) in January, and met the Carlyles, Venables, Brookfields, Tom Taylors, Goldwin Smith and Spedding. Brookfield wrote : " Alfred has been most cheerful and the life of the party." The note by my father is : " It seems a house not uneasy to live in, only I regret my little fumitory at Farringford. Here they smoke among the oranges, lemons, and camellias....! cannot see in Lady Ashburton a touch of the haughtiness which fame attri- butes to her. She is most perfectly natural, tho' like enough she sometimes snubs her own grade now and then, when she sees presumption and folly. But as Brookfield said this morning, ' She is very loyal to her printers.^ "
During the winter evenings of 1855 my father would translate the Odyssey aloud into Biblical prose to my mother, who writes, " Thus I get as much as it is possible to have of the true spirit of the original."
413
414 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [1866
He had been evolving the main scheme of the " Idylls of the King " at different periods during the last twenty years and more : the Morte d'Arthur episode had appeared in the volume of 1842. He resumed the plan with " Merlin and Nimue " (called " Vivien ") in February; and in the " Forest of Broceliande " are many reminis- cences of what was now the near scenery of the New Forest ^ This Idyll was finished by March 31st, and " Geraint and Enid " begun on April i6th.
Meantime for daily exercise he planted trees and shrubs ; rolled the lawn and dug in the kitchen garden, taking all the while a loving note of Nature. Thus as he was digging one day a well-known line formed itself :
As careful robins eye the delver's toil.
Farringford being now his property, the Twickenham furniture was brought over to the new home. As it was unpacked, my father's eye was struck by a certain crimson-covered sofa and some oak chairs grouped to- gether in the farmyard in front of the old thatched farmstead and the ivy-covered wall through which the kitchen garden is entered. "What a picture it would make!" he said; repeating his new song in "Enid," that then for the first time came to him:
Turn fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud.
Presently, within doors, while the books were being sorted and rearranged, all imaginable things strewed over the drawing-room floor, and the chairs and tables in wild disarray, Prince Albert called. He had driven over suddenly from Osborne. The parlour-maid went to the front door, heard the Prince's name announced, and, being bewildered and not knowing into what room to show him, stood stock still ; so the Equerry, I have been told, took
1 On one occasion he stayed in the New Forest with his friend, the well- known ornithologist, Lord Lilford, in order to observe the bird-life there.
1866] VISIT OF PRINCE ALBERT. 415
her by the shoulders and turned her round, bidding her lead them in. The Prince expressed great admiration of the view from the drawing-room window, and one of the party gathered a bunch of cowslips which H. R. H. said he must take to the Queen.
From the first the Prince was very cordial, and impressed my father as being a man of strong and self-sacrificing nature.
In June news came that R.'s bank would probably break and that all my father's little savings might be lost. On July 2nd my mother wrote: "A. showed a noble disregard of money, much as the loss would affect us." That evening, so as to give her courage, he asked her to play and sing the grand Welsh national air, " Come to battle": and afterwards, to divert themselves from dwelling on the possible loss, they hung their Michael Angelo engravings round the drawing-room.
In July and August my father and mother took us children to Wales, and here " Enid " was all but finished. We stayed at Llangollen, then at Dolgelly, and at Bar- mouth. My father spoke of " the high rejoicing lines of Cader Idris." My mother wrote : ^^SepL 8iA. A. climbed Cader Idris. Pouring rain came on. I and the children waited a long time for him. I heard the roar of waters, streams and cataracts, and I never saw anything more awful than that great veil of rain drawn straight over Cader Idris, pale light at the lower edge. It looked as if death were behind it, and made me shudder when I thought he was there. A message came from him by the guide that he had gone to Dolgelly."
It was near Festiniog that he heard the roar of a cataract above the roar of the torrent, and wrote that Virgilian simile :
For as one, That listens near a torrent mountain-brook, All thro' the crash of the near cataract hears
4l6 HOXE LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [iM*
The dramming thunder of the huger fall At distance, were the soldiers wont to hear His voice in battle.
He particularly admired the still pools of the torrent in the •* Torrent Walk *• at Dolgelly, and the mysterious giant steps of Cwn Bychan. Hariech, Festiniog, Llanid- loes, Builth, Caerleon were the next halting-places ; and on September i6th he wrote: **The Usk murmurs by the windows, and I sit like King Arthur in Caerleon. This is a most quiet, half-ruined \Tllage <rf about 1 500 inhabitants with a Uttle museum of Roman tombstones and other things." From Caerleon he made expeditions to Caerphilly, Merthyr Tyd\Tl, Raglan; and then we all returned by Brecon, Gloucester and Salisbury home. With the help of local schoolmasters in Wales my parents had learned some Welsh, and now read together the Hants Cjmru (Welsh HistoryX the Mabinogum and Uywarck Hen.
On £>ec 31st a characteristic letter was sent to a stranger who had forwarded a volume di verse :
I have as you desired considered your poem, and diough I make it a rule to decline passing any judgment cm poems. I cannot in this instance refrain from giving yoo a word di advice.
Follow your calling diligently, for be assured, work, far frcnn being a hardship, b a Messing and if yoa are a poet indeed, you will find in it a help not a hindrance. Yoo might, if you chose, offer these lines to some maga- zine, but you must not be surprised if diey are refosed, for the poetic gift is so comiiK» in these da3rs that hondreds must have to endure this disappointment, ^nd I should not be an honest friend if I did not prepoure yoa fordiat
I shook! by no means lecommend ytm to lisk tiie poblicatioQ of a volume on yoor own accotrnt. TIk
1857] LETTER FROM MRS CARLYLE. 417
publication of verse is almost always attended with loss*
As an amusement to yourself and your friends, the
writing is all very well. Accept my good wishes and
believe me,
Your obedient servant,
A. Tennyson.
1857.
An invitation was sent in January to Mr and Mrs Carlyle. The latter answered:
5 Cheynb Road, Chelsea,
21J/ January^ 1857.
My DEAR Mrs Tennyson,
You are a darling woman to have gone and written to me on the " voluntary principle " such a kind little note I You to have been at the trouble to know that / was ill ! You to express regret at my illness. I feel both surprised and gratified, as if I were an obsolete word that some great Poet (Alfred Tennyson for example) had taken a notion to look up in the Dictionary.
In London^ when one is sick, especially when one continues sick for three months, one falls so out of thought I it is much if even your female friend, in the next street, do not weary of you and then forget you ! I say female advisedly for, to give the Devil his due, I find that men hold out longer than women against the loss of one's "powers of pleasing."
Now however I begin to be about : and have no longer the pretext of illness for straining what Mr Carlyle calls " the inestimable privilege of being as ugly and stupid and disagree- able as ever one likes I " and my friends drop in more frequently and sit much longer I
The heartiest thanks for your invitation to Freshwater.
Wouldn't I like to go and visit you if that man would leave his eternal Frederick and come along ! nay wouldn't I like to go on my own small basis, if only I had the nerve for it, which I have not yet ! He goes nowhere, sees nobody, only for two
T. L «\
4l8 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [l867
hours a day he rides, like the wild German Hunter, on a horse he has bought, and which seems to like the sort of thing ! Such a horse ! he (not the horse) never wearies, in the intervals of Frederick^ of celebrating the creature's "good sense, courage and sensibility ! " " Not once," he says, " has the creature shown the slightest disagreement from him in any question of In- tellect'' (more than can be said of most living Bipeds)! I wrote to a relation in Scotland, " If this horse of Mr C/s dies, he will certainly write its biography," and that very day he said to me, " My dear, I wish I could find out about the genealogy of that horse of mine ! and some particulars of its life I I am begin- ning to feel sure it is a Cockney."
Poor Lady Ashburton has made nothing by leaving the Grange deserted this winter, she has been quite ill ever since she went to Nice.
May I offer my aflfectionate regards to your husband ? And may I gfive yourself a kiss ?
Yours very truly,
Jane Welsh Carlyle.
In April a report reached us that Tom Moore was dying. A friend writes : " This darling old poet is only just alive, mind and body. X goes over frequently to see him and read him your poems, which he cries over and delights in."
" Enid " and " Nimue, or The True and the False " were put into print this summer.
In June the American translator of Faust, Bayard Taylor, stayed at Farringford and was full of talk. Among other things he told my father that the most beautiful sight in the world was a Norwegian forest in winter, sheathed in ice, the sun rising over it and making the whole landscape one rainbow of flashing diamonds.
Taylor published the following account of his visit to us:
1857] BAYARD TAYLOR AT FARRINGFORD. 419
As we drew near Freshwater, my coachman pointed out Farringf ord, a cheerful gray country mansion with a small thick- grassed park before it, a grove behind, and beyond all, a deep shoulder of the chalk downs, a gap in which, at Freshwater, showed the dark blue horizon of the Channel. Leaving my luggage at one of the two little inns, I walked to the house, with lines from " Maud " chiming in my mind. " The dry-tongued laurel" shone glossily in the sun, the cedar "sighed for Lebanon" on the lawn, and "the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea " glimmered afar. I had not been two minutes in the drawing-room before Tennyson walked in. So unlike are the published portraits of him, that I was almost in doubt as to his identity. The engraved heads suggest a moderate stature, but he is tall and broad-shouldered as a son of Anak, with hair, beard and eyes of southern darkness. Something in the lofty brow and aquiline nose suggests Dante, but such a deep mellow chest-voice never could have come from Italian lungs. He proposed a walk, as the day was wonderfully clear and beautiful. We climbed the steep comb of the chalk cliflF, and slowly wandered westward till we reached the Needles, at the extremity of the Island and some three or four miles from his residence. During the conversation with which we beguiled the way, I was struck with the variety of his knowledge. Not a little flower on the downs, which the sheep had spared, escaped his notice, and the geology of the coast, both terrestrial and submarine, was perfectly familiar to him. I thought of a remark I once heard from the lips of a distinguished English author (Thackeray), that " Tennyson was the wisest man he knew," and could well believe that he was sincere in making it.
July i)th. My mother writes in her journal : "A. has brought me as a birthday present the first two lines that he has made of * Guinevere ' which might be the nucleus of a great poem. Arthur is parting from Guinevere and says:
• But hither shall I never come again, Never lie by thy side ; see thee no more : Farewell 1 ' "
27— a
420 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [l867
July 25M. The following letter was received from Mr Ruskin about the edition of the Poems illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt and others, in which my father had taken great interest, having called on most of the artists so as to give them Jiis views of what the illustrations ought to be.
Edinburgh, July 24M, 1857. My dear Sir,
It is a long time since I have heard from you and I do not like the mildew to grow over what little memory you may have of me.
It is however no excuse for writing to say that I wanted to congratulate you on the last edition of your poems. Indeed it might be and I hope will be some day better managed, still many of the plates are very noble things, though not, it seems to me, illustrations of your poems.
I believe in fact that good pictures never can be ; they are always another poem, subordinate but wholly different from the poet's conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect various minds. But these woodcuts will be of much use in making people think and puzzle a little ; art was getting quite a matter of form in book- illustrations, and it does not so much matter whether any given vignette is right or not, as whether it contains thought or not, still more whether it contains any kind of plain facts. If people have no sympathy with St Agnes, or if people as soon as they get a distinct idea of a living girl who probably got scolded for dropping her candle-wax about the convent-stairs, and caught Cold by looking too long out of the window in her bedgown, feel no true sympathy with her, they can have no sympathy in them.
But we P. R. B.'s ^ must do better for you than this some day : meantime I do congratulate you on " The wind is blowing in turret and tree," and Rossetti's Sir Galahad and Lady of Shalott, and one or two more.
^ Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
1867] TOUR TO MANCHESTER, CONISTON, ETC. 42 1
Please send me a single line to Denmark Hill, Camberwell, and believe me
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
This summer the tour was to Manchester, Coniston, Inverary Castle, and Carstairs (the home of my father's college friend Monteith). On this journey he read aloud Tom Brown's School-Days to my mother, enjoying it thoroughly.
When at Manchester my parents heard Dickens recite his Christmas Carol.
A visit was made to the Exhibition held there, and much time spent in studying Holman Hunt's pictures, the Turner sketches, Mulready's drawings, and various fine Gainsboroughs and Reynolds.
Hawthorne was in the same room, and my father afterwards expressed great regret that he had not been introduced to the author of The Scarlet Letter. Haw- thorne wrote : " Gazing at him with all my eyes I liked him well, and rejoiced more in him than in all the wonders of the Exhibition."
After the tour Mrs Browning wrote to enquire after
his health :
Alia Villa Toscana,
Bagni di Lucca. September 6th, 1857.
My dear Mrs Tennyson,
We see in the Galignani that Mr Tennyson is not well, by the side of threats of fall of our Indian empire and other disasters ; and it disquiets us to the point that I must write to ask you whether it is true or not and how far ? The trade of newspapers is to blow bubbles, and a little breath more or less determines the size of the bubble.
May this be a mere bubble! write one word to say so. Oh may you be able to smile at my question froig over the seal
But remember we have lost our friend, your brother Frederick,
422 HOME LIFE AND "* IDYLLS." [l867
from whom we could always hear about you ! He has devastated our Florence for us by going to live at Pisa ; and now he is farther off still, at Genoa, while we are mountain- locked here with no news from anybody.
The spring and summer have been heavy to me from a family g^ef \ but we three are well, thank God, living quietly in the shade till the sun shall have done his worst and best alas ! in this beautiful Italy. Little Penini' is very happy, gossiping with the Contadini, among whom he passes for un Vero Fiorentino, though he talks English inside the house as fast as Italian out of it. I hope that one day he may know your boys. How sorry I was to leave England last year without seeing them or you, or "King Arthur"!
My husband made me envious by the advantage he had over me in having listened to a certain exquisite music of which I •could only dream.
Just before we left Florence to come hither, we saw your brother Frederick who went there for a day or two. We thought we never saw him looking so well. It was provoking to hear, very provoking ; but he maintained that he 5/^/ at Pisa as he never could at Florence. I was very cross, and inclined to retort that at Pisa one slept by day as well as by night, the place was so dull.
Think of our loss having to lose him !
Dear Mrs Tennyson, will you send me just a few words } Really we are anxious. Being in all affection to both of you, his and yours,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
& R. B.
A letter came about this time from Colonel Phipps, saying that the Queen desired that a stanza should be added to God save the Queen for a concert to be given at Buckingham Palace on the evening of the Princess Royal's wedding-day. These two stanzas were sent in answer, and published in the Times, January 26th, 1858 :
^ Death of her fether.
^ Familiar name of their son.
1867] DEATH OF HAVELOCK. 423
God bless our Prince and Bride! God keep their lands allied,
God save the Queen! Clothe them with righteousness, Crown them with happiness, Them with all blessings bless,
God save the Queen.
Fair fall this hallow'd hour. Farewell our England's flower,
God save the Queen! Farewell, fair rose of May! Let both the peoples say, God bless thy marriage-day,
God bless the Queen.
For the last few months the Indian Mutiny had excited the profoundest interest throughout the country, and on Christmas Day the account of the relief of Lucknow arrived. Havelock's death, which had occurred on Nov. 25th, was not then known. When this sad news came, my father wrote the following lines:
Have lock. Nov. i^ih, 1857. {Unpublished)
Bold Havelock march'd. Many a mile went he, Everv mile a battle. Every battle a victory.
•
Bold Havelock march'd, Charged with his gallant few. Ten men fought a thousand. Slew them and overthrew.
Bold Havelock march'd. Wrought with his hand and his head, March'd and thought and fought, March'd and fought himself dead.
424 HOME UFE AND " IDYLLS.** [1868
Bold Havelock died, Tender and great and good, And every man in Britain Says " I am of Havelock's blood ! "
1858.
In January "The Parting of Arthur and Guinevere" was finished and my mother records her first impression — " It is awe-inspiring." On March 8th the entry in her journal is: "To-day he has written his song of *Too Late,' and has said it to me"; and on March 15th, "* Guinevere' is finally completed."
My father then occasionally wrote in his new summer- house looking towards the down and the sea; and on the windows of which he was painting marvellous dragons and sea-serpents. " One day " (she sa)rs), " while writing his * Guinevere,' A. spoke of * the want of reverence now-a-days for great men, whose brightness, like that of the luminous bodies in the Heaven, makes the dark spaces look the darker.' "
At this time he sent a letter to Dr Mann in Natal :
Our winter has been the mildest I have ever known. I read of ripe pomegranates hanging on a houseside at Bath, and I myself counted scores of our wild summer roses on a hedge near, flourishing in December and lasting on into January, tho' now gone, for the temperature has changed. They were perfectly fragrant, and I brought home a bouquet of them and put them in water. You ask after the farm ? I cannot say that * * is going on satisfactorily, very niggard of manure in the fields and ever doing his best to 'reave me of my rent by working at little odd jobs as a set o£F, so that at the end of the year, all things deducted, I get almost nothing. I am now building a \\ll\e ^ArcKovfcx-Vvovise to catch the southern
1868] VISIT FROM SWINBURNE. 425
sun in Maiden's Croft, if you remember what field that is. I shall sit there and bask in the sunbeams and think of you far south. How I should love to rove about that parklike scenery of which you give such a fascinating account !
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
P.S. I may tell you however that young Swinburne called here the other day with a college friend of his, and we asked him to dinner, and I thought him a very modest and intelligent young fellow. Moreover I read him what you vindicated \ but what I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own. Good-bye. How desolate No. 7 B. T. must feel itself!
Several friends urged the immediate publication of the newly-written Idylls, among them Jowett, who says :
I have great pleasure in sending some books which I hope you will accept, the best books in the world (except the Bible), Homer and Plato.
I take the opportunity also of enclosing Lempriire's Diction- ary. The price is is. 6d. The bookseller valued it so little that he offered to give me the book. I have added two or three other books which I thought you might like to see, the trans- lation of the Vedas as a specimen of the oldest thing in the world, Hegel's Philosophy of History ^ which is just " the in- creasing purpose that through the ages runs " buried under a heap of categories. If you care to look at it will you turn to the pages I have marked at the beginning ? It is a favourite book of mine. I do not feel certain of the impression it will make on anyone else.
I also send you the latest and best work on Mythology, and Bunsen's new Bibelbiuh, which, from the little I have read, seems to be an interesting and valuable introduction to Scripture. What
^ Later Swinburae writes : '^ < Maud' is the poem of the deepest charm and fullest delight, pathos and melody ever written, even by Mt T^tvd^v^'^?
426 HOME UFE AND "IDYLLS." [I868
a cartload of heavy literature ! Do not trouble yourself to read or to send it back to me : I will carry it away some day myself.
I fear I have no news to tell you, and " the art of letter- writing " Dr Johnson says "consists solely in telling news."
May I say a word about " mosquitoes * " ? Anyone who cares about you is deeply annoyed that you are deterred by them from writing or publishing. The feeling grows and brings in after years the still more painful and deeper feeling that they have prevented you from putting out half your powers. Noth- ing is so likely to lead to misrepresentation. Persons don't understand that sensitiveness is often combined with real manli- ness as well as great intellectual gifts, and they regard it as a sign of fear and weakness.
A certain man on a particular day has his stomach out of order and the stomach " getteth him up into the brain," and he calls another man " morbid." He is morbid himself and wants soothing words, and the whole world is morbid with dissecting and analysing itself and wants to be comforted and put together again. Might not this be the poet's office, to utter the " better voice " while Thackeray is uttering the worse one ? I don't mean to blame Thackeray, for I desire to take the world as it is in this present age, crammed with self-consciousness, and no doubt Thackeray's views are of some value in the direction of anti-humbug.
But there is another note needed afterwards to show the good side of human nature and to condone its frailties which Thackeray will never strike. That note would be most thank- fully received by the better part of the world.
Give my love to Hallam and Lionel. Tell Hallam I have put his letter " where I can always see it," and that I read every day about " Louise."
No more about " mosquitoes," I have bored you enough. With most kind regards to Mrs Tennyson,
Ever yours truly,
B. JOWKTT.
At this time Lord Dufiferin wrote from Highgate, with a copy of his Letters from High Latitudes.
1868] DUFFERIN's "LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES." 427
My dear Mr Tennyson,
I am going to do a very bold thing, but in asking you to accept the accompanying book I hope you will consider I am only obeying an impulse I have felt for many many years, but to which until now I have never had any excuse for giving way.
For the first 20 years of my life I not only did not care for poetry, but to the despair of my friends absolutely disliked it, at least so much of it as until that time had fallen in my way. In vain my mother read to me Dryden, Pope, Byron, Young, Cowper and all the standard classics of the day, each seemed to me as distasteful as I had from early infancy found Virgil : and I shall never forget her dismay when at a literary dinner I was cross-examined as to my tastes, and blushingly confessed before an Olympus of poets that I rather disliked poetry than otherwise.
Soon afterwards however I fell in with a volume of yours, and suddenly felt such a sensation of delight as I never experienced before. A new world seemed open to me, and from that day, by a constant study of your works, I gradually worked my way to a thorough appreciation of what is good in all kinds of authors.
Naturally enough I could not help feeling very grateful to the Orpheus whose music had made the gate of poet-land fly open, and for years I longed to make your acquaintance. Now that I have done so I cannot help wishing to make you a little thank-offering as a token of my sense of what I owe to you, and however insignificant, I trust you will accept it as being the best and only thing I have to give.
Ever yours sincerely, Dufferin.
April ^th. Professor Tyndall, Mr Newman and Mr Dicey called : my father said of Tyndall: "He is such a good fellow, so unscornful and genial, so full of imagina- tion and of enthusiasm for his work ! "
In July we stayed at Little Holland House, Ken- sington, with the Prinseps : and here m^ faA.\\« Vife?gixw
428 HOME UFE AND "IDYLLS." [1868
"The Fair Maid of Astolat," and read aloud "The Grandmother."
Watts was at work on what his friends called " the great moonlight portrait " of the Bard.
It was then that my father met Ruskin again. A voice from the corner of the room exclaimed : " Jones, you are gigantic." This was Ruskin apostrophizing Burne Jones as an artist.
From Little Holland House my father started on a trip to Norway, and he wrote in his Letter-Diary :
Started from Hull on July 23rd. Saw E. on board the little New Holland Steamer, and waved my hand- kerchief as both our boats were moving ofif : watched the two lights of Spurn Point till they became one star and then faded away. Next day very fine but in the night towards morning storm arose and our topmast was broken ofif. I stood next morning a long time by the cabin door and watched the green sea looking like a mountainous country, far ofif waves with foam at the top looking like snowy mountains bounding the scene ; one great wave, green-shining, past with all its crests smoking high up beside the vessel \ As I stood there came a sudden hurricane and roared drearily in the funnel for twenty seconds and past away.
Christiansand. Went up into the town and saw the wooden houses.
^ They couched their spears and prickM their steeds, and thas. Their plumes driven backward by the wind they made In moving, all together down upon him Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North-sea, Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, Down on a bark, and overbears the bark, And him that helms it, so they overbore Sir Lancelot and his charger.
<^ Lancelot and Elaine.^
1J - HOMi- ..ii r. ANj^ ' .i-i'i.I.S.
• 1
Miif! -r A/Uilrit." and it :k1 n^oud •* T .
■' .:• •■ -.is <u \x;;'^ -n wh t liis /rienJs ra"* d ■..
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l-. •\::;: 11-.' I. 'li-.i •- / iatS^r rnet KusIcIm :^^^
I u n . i •i''- H(: » in i M'.'i>;> -ly father -t:r:.-' M*iu t • A . ■.^..'. :'''\\ \. w ' vv »; ■" " Inciter- DuvTV'
;■' ■.. : ^'\\\ !:• • u Mv :i rd. S:u\ E. •*•;- • - i-'i ;« ''-.w M- ' .: ; ^.. *:jw. Hid v\aved my .
^ • : ^i t .,, :c.- r ^j'V hil 'hev bcc* .1k: OTIC bv«t' i'. .
v,: . \r t diy^ cry fine l.'V.t in the \^\c. ; •■ ' . ./. >' n:: nroscj *>:. 1 •')ur topmast w.. • i *■)'.:■■) i.rxt m Tn ^*j^ n iOi>g time by }■■• : OT r: : 1 witciiv'd *J»o i^v ♦. . ?cr loAing l:"--" - . .::;«.. ■ c ;^. itrv. ri." :/ 'v;^ .(.:> with to^im at th*-- '-v «- :;:.\ :.>. 'Mt>..v n.-:. '..:^^ i.>0':»'JiniZ me SD ne . »■.• ,.....' »v;i>v I. . ..; ■/. '■;. <<^ : oM With all its ci'C^ts smo" i-:uh i.v *-:.>Mi*.- '.. t ' • -su '. \< I sti od th vre cam •i..i.:ori .*'.', r- ':/• .r : roarod drcari]} in lie funnt' :. 'w ;.+;. •' : *Hv\^ :;nd pasc away.
< K^;sv!. >.-.^Ki M'ent up 'nto tl:o town and saw '- ■
->'..
''V • ; -jc^ ''^f'\ >pe.u.-. a;' ; ijrick^l ti^eir i-tcc.'b, and iivis, <.;:•.'• *. .'j h^ik.^''»- i:v ■/. . wind 'hoy made
l\ . ■■• ■ ■*,!.! w.iV' ... ♦'If .'j \ .;^-^,ea.
♦ .' ».'.. ^* .•■ '•iJ.T tow.-; '.• . rt* ', '.'.r.iii l»e:iis, wr- a'l
' .-v.. :: .;. :. iiV. aT;c <• r.l/c.ir-j tj^.e * ark. Ar-i"! ;< '. .:.:■ .' j'o'- »t. ,*!> '.'i .^' i r^ ore Si? L'^ntv .^. • 'V A\: f ;..iiger.
^ Lane Jot a^^d El:iiue/*
pvm the Jinrtrai/j in iat /ii-jjfMU-n I'l—Jaiiy./icnryCJitn
1858] TOUR IN NORWAY. 429
August 1st. Christiania. Magnificent seas on the way here. At Christiansand called on a Mr Murch, and the Frau Murch gave me a splendid bouquet of flowers : arrived here at 6 this afternoon. I write this at the house of Mr Crowe, consul, looking over the Sound — very pretty in the evening light. Am not quite certain whether I shall join Barrett and the other.
August 2nd. Christiania. I let Barrett and Tweedie go by themselves to Bergen. I am starting to-day to see the Riukan Foss with Mr Woodfall, a very quiet sensible man, and we shall take our time. I have had great kindness from the Crowes. Yesterday a Norwegian introduced himself at the hotel, and began to spout my own verses to me ; and I likewise rather to my annoy- ance found myself set down in the Christiania papers as " Den beromte engelske Digter."
I have seen the Riukan Foss. Magnificent power of water; weird blue light behind the fall.
On his return the Frederick Maurices visited us at Farringford. Mr Maurice read family prayers in the morning, and my mother notes : "A. rejoiced as much as I did in his reading — * the most earnest and holiest reading,' A. said, * he had ever heard.' "
In the evenings my father recited his new poems "The Grandmother" and "Sea Dreams \" saying that the rascal in " Sea Dreams " was drawn from a man who had grossly cheated him in early life. Mr Maurice was charmed with the place : t
Groves of pine on either hand, To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary Channel Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand.
^ First published in MacmiUaiCs Magazine^ Jan. i860.
1
450 HOME LIFE AND ''IDYLLS." [186B
If his doctrine had been somewhat more within ordinary comprehension, my father was of opinion that he would have taken his place as foremost thinker among the Churchmen of our time. Consequently the following dedication of Maurice's Theological Essays gave him great pleasure.
My dear Sm,
I have maintained in these Essays that a Theology, which does not correspond to the deepest thoughts and feelings of human beings cannot be a true Theology. Your writings have taught me to enter into many of these thoughts and feelings. Will you forgive me the presumption of ofiFering you a book which at least acknowledges them and does them homage?
As the hopes which I have expressed in this volume are more likely to be fulfilled to our children than to ourselves, I might perhaps ask you to accept it as a present to one of your name, in whom you have given me a very sacred interest ^ Many years, I trust, will elapse, before he knows that there are any controversies in the world into which he has entered Would to God that in a few more he may find that they have ceased ! At all events, if he should look into these Essays^ they may tell him what meaning some of the former generation attached to words, which will be familiar and dear to his generation, and to those that follow his, how there were some who longed that the bells of our churches might indeed
Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Believe me, my dear Sir,
Yours very truly and gratefully,
F. D. Maurice.
Two ideas which Maurice expressed my father would quote with approbation, that the "real Hell was the
^ See p. 358.
1868] A COMET. 43 1
('absence of God from the human soul, and that all religions seemed to him to be imperfect manifestations of the true Christianity."
I remember too his reading with admiration this passage from Maurice's Friendship of Books. " If I do not give you extracts from any of Milton's specially controversial writings, it is not that I wish to pass them over because the conclusions in them are often directly opposed to mine, for I think that I have learnt most from those that are so."
Oct. ^th. "To-day," my mother says, "A. took a volume of the Morte d' Arthur and read a noble passage about the battle with the Romans. He went to meet Mr and Mrs Roebuck at dinner at Swainston : and the comet was grand, with Arcturus shining brightly over the nu- cleus. At dinner he said he must leave the table to look at it and they all followed. They saw Arcturus seem- ingly dance as if mad ^ when it passed out of the comet's tail. He said of the comet's tail, * It is like a besom of destruction sweeping the sky.' " When he returned next night he " observed the comet from his platform ^ and, when he came down to tea, read some Paradise Lost''
Oct. ijth. He read aloud "The Rape of the Lock," and noted the marvellous skill of many of the couplets.
November. My father writes : " I have just seen Ruskin : he says that the Signor's (G. F. Watts') portrait of me is the grandest thing he has seen in that line, but so he said of (Woolner's) bust^"
During these last months of the year he was full of the Queen's wise proclamation to India after the trans- ference of the government from the Company to the
lAUuded to in "Harold."
* The platform on the top of the house was a favourite place with him at night, and there he continually observed the stars.
* Now in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
432 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS.'' [l«68
Crown. The Indian Mutiny had stirred him to the depths.
Letters from the Rev. B. Jowett.
Dec. 1858. Dear Mrs Tennyson,
We shall long remember your kind hospitality, which made the Easter Vacation a very happy time to us.
You asked me whether I could suggest any subjects for poetry. I have been so presumptuous as to think of some. I don't believe that poetical feelings and imagery on subjects can ever be exhausted. That is only a fancy which comes over us when our minds are dry or in moments of depression. This generation is certainly more poetical and imaginative than the last, and perhaps in spite of the critics the next may be more poetical than our own.
And as to the critics their power is not really great Waggon- loads of them are lighting fires every week or on their way to the grocers.
I often fancy that the critical form of modem literature is like the rhetorical one which overlaid ancient literature and will be regarded as that is, at its true worth in after times. One drop of natural feeling in poetry or the true statement of a single new fact is already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.
I suggested " old age " to Mr Tennyson, a sort of " In • Memoriam '' over a lost child, wandering in soothing strains over all the thoughts and feelings of the aged. It always seems to me that " old age " has been badly treated by poets notwith- standing Burns' beautiful ballad. Its beauty, its sadness, its peace, its faded experience of life are good elements of poetry. An old lady once said to me quite simply, " The spuits of my children always seem to hover about me ^." Might not some- thing of the kind be expressed in verse ? If it could, like " The May Queen," it would touch the chords of many hearts.
The 2 Sam. xix. 34, 35 is to me a very affecting passage.
1 My father had heard this saying before, and it was the germ of ^ The Grandmother.^'
1868] SUBJECTS FOR POEMS. 433
I wish Mr Tennyson could be persuaded to put the " Dog^a of Immortality " to verse, not the fanciful hope of Immortality from "recollections of childhood/' nor the conceptions of a future life derived from the imagery of Scripture such as are common in devotional poetry, but an heroic measure suited to manly minds embodying the deep ethical feeling which convinces us that the end of the Maker though dark is not here. I believe such a poem might be a possession for the world and better (what a bathos !) than ten thousand sermons.
Subjects like blackberries seem to me capable of being gathered oflf every hedge. (That shows the folly of suggesting what anybody can find for themselves anywhere.) I do not see why the Greek Mythology might not be the subject of a poem ; not Wordsworth's "Lively Grecian," but such as it is in the philosophical idea of it as the twilight of the human mind, which lingers still among forms of sense and is unable to pierce them.
Have not many sciences such as Astronomy or Geology a side of feeling which is poetry? No sight touches ordinary persons so much as a starlight night.
I think you once said to me that " Whole philosophies might be contained in a line of verse." Is it not true also that whole periods of history, seen by the light of modem ideas, admit of being described in short passages of poetry ? Representative men such as Charlemagne or Hildebrand seem to me safer than the shadowy personages of the legends of romance.. The Coronation of Charlemagne, and the scene of Hildebrand and the Emperor might help to form the situation. New. friends oe foes with old faces might occasionally peep out
A representative from one of the Monastic orders similar in- idea to St Simeon Stylites and to be called St Francis of Assisi, more Christian and less barbarous, would perhaps be possible.
Painters like to teach new lessons in nature. The successive phases of the human mind in different ages are subjects for poetry even more than for philosophy. Might not the poet teach many lessons of that sort, not in the sesthetical, artistic manner of Goethe but with simpler English poetic feeling ?
Now I have said enough foolish things and will conclude. You will do me a great favour if you will let me know of any books that I can send Mr Tennyson which you think may be
T. L 28
434 HOME UFE AND "IDYLLS.*' [I868
useful or suggestive. Almost anything can be got here, or if you will tell me the subjects, I can find the books.
I hold most strongly that it is the duty of everyone who has the good fortune to know a man of genius, to do any trifling service they can to lighten his work.
I will write to Mr Tennyson in a few days. Remember me to him and
Believe me most truly yours,
B. JOWETT.
Ball Coll.
Dec. \2th^ 1858.
Dear Mrs Tennyson,
I cannot but feel greatly ashamed of my ingratitude and disrespect in not having answered your last kind letter which gave me great pleasure at the time I received it. I believe that ingratitude is not the real cause (for that I could not possibly feel) but inveterate indolence about certain things, among which I fear come some of the duties of friendship.
You return me good for evil by sending me the two sweet letters of the children; which I recognize as most genuine productions. Give my love to the two " little birds." Lionel's epistle especially is just a picture of a child's mind.
I ^ope Mr Tennyson is well and has good success in his great work^ Authors great and small have some trials in common and some joys when a " book is bom into the world."
I think I have read somewhere a description of Bums' ¥dfe and child coming to meet him when he was in a sort of ecstasy, "with the tears rolling down his cheeks," writing "Tam 0' Shanter" at the side of a stream. That must be a great alleviation. I am sure it is only success (in the higher sense) and not resignation or philosophy that can make an author happy.
I do not doubt that the world will be charmed with the "Arthur Idylls." No malice will be able to prevent people from seeing that they are most beautiful poems. I have more
1 TKe « Idylls ot the King."
1868] LETTERS FROM JOWETT. 435
hesitation (shall I go on ?) about the other poem respecting the clerk and wife^, and could wish that the fortunes of it were tried alone so as not to interfere with the good-will towards "Arthur."
The scene and the satirical passage appear to me the doubtful points. It seems to me quite as fine as the " Idylls/' but I speak with reference to its effect on the public.
You told me that I might suggest to you any subjects that I dreamed of. Did I mention "Jupiter Olympius," the statue of Phidias ? The subject could partly be the Olympic games and the interest the Classical Greek feeling of the poem. But now I want to suggest something that would " express the thoughts of many hearts/' which I must always think to be the highest excellence of poetry, and afford a solace where it is much needed. The subject I mean is " In Memoriam " for the dead in India. It might be done so as to include some scenes of Cawnpore and Lucknow ; or quite simply and slightly, " Relatives in India/' the schemings and hopings and imaginings about them, iand the fatal missive suddenly announcing their death. They leave us in the fairness and innocence of youth, with nothing but the vision of their childhood and boyhood to look back upon, and return no more.
Perhaps you know what sets my thoughts upon this, the death of my dear brother, the second who has died in India. It matters nothing to the world, for they had never the opportunity of distinguishing themselves, but it matters a great deal to me. They were dear good disinterested fellows, most unselfish in their ways, and as grateful to me for what I did for them when they were boys, as if it had been yesterday. I like to think of them in the days of their youth busying themselves with eng^eering which was their great amusement. They were wonderfully attached to each other. The younger one especially, who died first about five years ago, was one of the sweetest dispositions I ever knew.
If I did not venture to look upon you and Mr Tennyson as something like friends, I should not venture to trouble you with this sorrow about persons whom you have never seen or heard of.
I hope to have the pleasure of coming to see you about the
1 « Sea Dreams."
436 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [18M
6th or 7th of January for a few days. But I could come at any other time if more convenient
Ever truly yours, B. Jowett.
1859-
The sudden death of Henry Hallam was a great grief to my father, for the historian had been a good friend through thirty years. On hearing of Mr Hallam's last days he read some " In Memoriam " aloud and dwelt on those passages which most moved him. Gene- rally when he was asked to read the poem he would refuse, saying : " It breaks me down, I cannot." In the spring of the year the four " Idylls of the King," "Enid," "Vivien," "Elaine," "Guinevere," were pre- pared for publication.
" Boadicea " was also written, the metre being " an echo of the metre in the *Atys' of Catullus^": he wished that it were musically annotated so that it might be read with proper quantity and force.
" Riflemen, Form ! " appeared in May in the Times after the outbreak of war between France, Piedmont, and Austria ; when more than one power seemed to be prepared to take the offensive against England ; and it rang like a trumpet-call through the length and breadth of the Empire. It so happened that three days later an order from the War Office came out, approving of the formation of Volunteer rifle corps. To Colonel Richards, who was one of the prominent promoters of the move- ment, my father wrote : " I must heartily congratulate you on your having been able to do so much for your country ; and I hope that you will not cease from your labours until it is the law of the land that every male child in it shall be trained to the use of arms." On the same day that " Riflemen, Form ! " was forwarded for
1 A. T. MS.
16»] "JACK TAR." 437
publication, the proofs of the last *' Idyll " (" Elaine ") were finally corrected for press ^ He made too a song for sailors :
Jack Tar. {Unpublished)
They say some foreign powers have laid their heads together To break the pride of Britain, and bring her on her knees, There's a treaty, so they tell us, of some dishonest fellows To break the noble pride of the Mistress of the Seas.
Up, Jack Tars, and save us! The whole world shall not brave us! Up and save the pride of the Mistress of the Seas!
We quarrel here at home, and they plot against us yonder, They will not let an honest Briton sit at home at ease : Up, Jack Tars, my hearties! and the d — 1 take the parties! Up and save the pride of the Mistress of the Seas ! Up, Jack Tars, and save us! The whole world shall not brave us! Up and save the pride of the Mistress of the Seas!
• Mr Coventry Patmore wrote to my father in May iSjg ; " It will please you to hear that 'Riflemen, Form I' is being responded to. I hear that fbnr hundred clerks of the War Office alone have at once answered to the Government invitation, and on my proposing that our department should send a cotttingeat, almost every man in the place put his name down, although a large cost will be incurred, and we are neariy all poor. If things go through the country at tlut rate, thtfe nerer will be an Invasioa."
438 HOME LIFE AND ''IDTLLS.'' [ittO
The lasses and the little ones. Jack Tars, they look to you! The despots over yonder, let 'em do whatever they please! God bless the little isle where a man may still be true! God bless the noble isle that is Mistress oi the Seas! Up, Jack Tars, and save us ! The whole world shall not brave us ! If you will save the pride of the Mistress ci the Seas.
In Ofue a Week, July i6th, was published "The Grandmother's Apology " with a beautiful illustration by Millais.
With a view to some new " Idylls of the King " my father was studying " Pelleas and Ettarre " and " La belle Isoude"; and, after working at those already in print, went for a holiday in August with Mr Palgrave to Portugal.
My fathet^s letter-diary. Journey to Portugal with F. T. Palgrave and F. C. Grove^.
August i6th. Radley's Hotel, Southampton. Have been over the Vectis, the name of the vessel, not Tagfus, Tagus being repaired, or running alternately with the Vectis. She is very prettily got up and painted, and apparently scrupulously clean. Brookfield * keeps up my spirits by wonderful tales, puns, etc. I find that neither Palgrave nor Grove wants to move except as I will and they are quite content to remain at Cintra.
August I jth. Have passed a night somewhat broken by railway whistles.
1 Eldest son of Judge Sir W. Grove.
' Brookfve\d bad coi&ft \.o %«& Vus friends off from Southampton.
1869] TOUR IN PORTUGAL. 439
[This — writes Palgrave — was Tennyson's second voyage (so far as I know) of more than Channel length. It was strange, that sensation of the little moving island, the vessel which was bridging for us the ocean between England and Iberia : " like a world hung in space/' as Tenn3rson called it. Tennyson's flow and fertility in anecdote, such as I have elsewhere tried to sketch it, was wonderful.
No need to dwell on the few incidents which broke the pleasant monotony of the voyage : porpoises plunging and re-appearing round the ship, like black wheels ploughing the gray-blue waters : small whales spouting theu: fountains on the near horizon: the meridian observations ; the rocks of Ushant : the beacon Hght on Finisterre : I name them only because of the vivid interest with which they were studied by Tennyson. But we desired nothing better than the far niente of those cloudless days. Presently, however, that craving for '' the palms and temples of the South " which he was never to gratify, fell upon Tennyson ; and he began to long in vain to push onward to Tcncriffe.]
August 21 St. Braganza Hotel, Lisbon. Just arrived at Lisbon and settled at the Braganza Hotel after a very prosperous voyage tho' with a good deal of rolling. We merely touched at Vigo which looked fruitful, rolled up in a hot mist, and saw Oporto from the sea, looking very white in a fat port-wine country. It is here just as hot as one would wish it to be but not at all too hot. There was a vast deal of mist and fog all along the coast as we came. Lisbon I have not yet seen except from the sea, and it does not equal expectation as far as seen ^ Palgrave and Grove have been helpful and pleasant companions, and so far all has gone well. We shall go to Cintra either to-morrow or next day. It is said to be Lisbon's Richmond and rather cockney tho' high and cool. The man who is landlord here is English and an Englishman keeps the hotel at Cintra. I hope with good hope that I shall not be pestered with the plagues of Egypt. I cannot say whether we shall.stick at Cintra or go further on. Brookfield gave a good account of the cleanliness of Seville.
^ Except the convent chapel at Belem.
440 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [i860
August 2^rd. Cintra, We drove over Lisbon yesterday in a blazing heat and saw the Church of St Vincent, and the Botanical Gardens where palms and prickly pears and huge cactuses were growing, and enormous oleanders covered all over with the richest red blossom, and I thought of our poor one at Farringford that won't blossom. There were two strange barbaric statues at the gate of the garden, which were dug up on the top of a hill in Portugal : some call them Phoenician but no one knows much about them. I tried to see the grave of Fielding the novelist, who is buried in the Protestant cemetery, but could find no one to let me in ; he lies among the cypresses. In the evening we came on here : the drive was a cold one, and the country dry, tawny, and wholly uninteresting. Cintra disappointed me at first sight, and perhaps will continue to disappoint, tho' to southern eyes from its ever green groves, in contrast to the parched barren look of the landscape, it must look very lovely. I climbed with Grove to the Pena, a Moorish-looking castle on the top of the hill, which is being repaired, and which has gateways fronted with tiles in pattern ; these gates look like those in the illustrated Arabian Nights of Lane \
August 26th. It is, I think, now decided that we are to go on to Cadiz and Seville on the 2nd, and then to Gibraltar and possibly to Tangiers, possibly to Malaga and Granada. The King's Chamberlain has found me out by my name : his name is the Marquis of Figueros or some such sound ; and yesterday even the Duke of Saldanha came into the salle ^ manger, described himself as "having fought under the great Duke, and having been in two and forty combats and successful in all, as having married two English wives, both perfect women," etc., and ended with seizing my hand and crying out
^ Then they strolled to the Bay of Apples.
1869] USBON. 441
" Who does not know England's Poet Laureate ? I am the Duke of Saldanha." I continue pretty well except for toothache ; I like the place much better as I know it better. A visit to Santarem (the city of convents) was greatly enjoyed.
[The town itself proved a labyrinth of narrow and filthy stieets, though here also were many large ecclesiastical buildings, ending in a vast ruined castle, which &om an immense height commanded the river valley. Here we two (for our pleasant comrade had now left us) sat long, and beneath us saw miles on miles of level land, forest and vineyard, dotted with unknown villages, and lighted up by the long curves of the Tagus. This undoubtedly is one of the great panoramic landscapes of Europe, and I suppose the least visited. Nearer the city, thorny lines of glaucous aloe, here and there throwing out lofty flower- stems, ran up the hill-sides planted thick with olive-trees, beneath which the sun now cast down long separate shadows, and illuminated the Tagus flowing right below our eyes between wide tawny sandbanks to the deepest fold of its green and sinuous channel^.]
Sept. 2nd. Lisbon. The heat and the f]ies and the f]eas and one thing or another have decided us to return by the boat to Southampton which starts from this place on the 7th. We propose on arriving at Southampton to pass on to Lyndhurst to spend two or three days in the Forest.
[Our visit, we gradually found, was not at the most Earourable season : the fields browned and burnt by heat, the mosquitoes afllicting. Against the tatter, Tennyson had provided himself with an elaborate tent (first contrived, I beUeve, by Sir C. Fellowes for use in Asia Minor, during the night-time) : a sheet formed into a large bag, but ending in a muslin canopy, which was distended by a cane circle, and bung upwards, to accommodate head and shoulders, from a nail which I took the freedom to run into his bedroom wall. Into this shelter the occupant crept by a narrow sheet-funnel, which he closed by twisting; and once in, he was unable to light a match outside for fear lest the action should set the muslin on fire. Hence one night Tennyson, able to command the bell, summoned the waiter. I brought him in through my (contiguous) room with a light ; and the man's terror at the spec- tacle of the great ghost, looking spectral within its white canopy, was > Palgrave MS.
442 HOME LIFE AND " IDYLLS,** [l8»
delightful. He almost ran off. But I think that after this experience Tennyson abandoned the tent and took his chances : only pretending to wish that he had a little baby in bed with him, as a whiter and more tempting morsel to the insect world.
More serious than the mosquito was the sun. This so wrought upon and disturbed Tennyson, in a manner with which many English travellers to Italy during the heat will be unpleasantly familiar, that he now began gravely to talk about leaving his bones by the side of the great novelist Fielding, who died and was buried at Lisbon in 1754 \]
Sept I if A. Southampton. Arrived, and going on to-morrow to Lyndhurst, where I shall stop two or three days, then I am going on to Cambridge with Palgrave from a longing desire that I have to be there once more.
Crown Hotel, Lyndhurst. Palgrave has been as kind to me as a brother, and far more useful than a valet or courier, doing everything. His father is away at Spa, he (Palgrave) is horrified at being alone. I gave him hopes of his being with me till his father returned and I do not therefore like to leave him.
Sepi. 20th. Cambridge. I have been spending the evening with my old tobacconist in whose house I used to lodge, and to-morrow I am to dine with Macmillan. I admire Jesus Chapel which is more like a Church than a Chapel.
[Palgrave writes : Cambridge was in Long Vacation, but Munro, the great Latin scholar, and W. G. Clark, then charming and gay, and unforeseeing the shadow destined to ecHpse his later days, feasted us ; welcoming Tennyson once again back to Trinity. He showed me, with pathos in his voice of memories distant and dear, Arthur Hallam's rooms ; the " Backs," to which Oxford (he would have it) ^^ has no rival,** and the curious Jacobean brickwork of Queens' College, where in his time the '' Combination room " had yet a sanded floor, and the table was set handsomely forth with long " church-wardens."]
In the autumn my father returned to Farringford and entertained the American statesman, Charles Sumner.
1 Palgrave MS.
1850] CHARLES KINGSLEY. 443
In November he was reading with intense interest an early copy of Darwin's Origin of Species^ sent him by his own desire ; and was finishing his " Tithonus," which he forwarded to Thackeray for the Comhill Magazine ^ A letter came from Charles Kingsley :
EvsRSLEY, 1859. My dear Tennyson,
I wrote for Eraser ^ September 1850, a review of you, and especially of '' In Memoriam." I am now going to publish a set of Miscellanies and thought of including that review. But when I read it through I thought I ought to ask your leave. I felt it almost too personal toward you in its expression of admiration and gratitude for your influence, and in its expression about " In Memoriam." It was necessary to be so then ; for, while penny-a-liners were talking vulgar and unkind personali- ties, I felt bound to tell all whom I could make listen, what a gentleman and a Christian ought to think of you and your work; but I am not sure that you would like all I said there republished now that the bubble is over. Will you say " Yes " or " No " } and if you will say " Yes," you will deeply gratify me ; for I wish to leave behind me some record of what I owe you. Pray remember me to Mrs Tennyson and to your children, whom I do not know alas ! I seem destined never to see you. Here I live, as busy as a bee in my parish, and never leave home but for urgent business.
Believe me your devoted C. Kingsley.
Soon after this the Kingsleys paid us a visit. " Charles Kingsley," so my father told me, " talked as usual on all sorts of topics and walked hard up and down the study for hours smoking furiously, and affirming that tobacco was the only thing that kept his nerves quiet." Among the topics discussed were the " Idylls " which Kingsley admired only less than "In Memoriam." Ten thousand copies had been sold in the first week of publi- cation, and hundreds more were selling monthly. The reviews that were best in my father's estimation appeared
^February, i860.
444 HOME LIFE AND ""mYLLS/' [l8M
in the Spectator^ the Edinburgh and the Quarterly^ the last by Mr Gladstone ^
Letters to and from friends about the ^^IdyUs^
From Henry W. Longfellow.
My dear Mr Tennyson,
I have requested my publishers in London, Messrs Routledge, to send you a copy of a translation of the Divina Commediay which I have had the temerity to make, and which they are now publishing. In the notes I have taken the liberty to quote your beautiful song of Fortune (from " Enid "), and also part of " Ulysses," at which, I hope, you will not be displeased, as you are in very good company. Many thanks for your kind letter acknowledging the (Red Indian) red stone pipe of peace. To a civilized human being I fancy it can never be of any practical use. But it is pretty, and has a certain value as com- ing from those far-away Western mountains.
Always with great regard yours truly,
Henry W. Longfellow.
From W. M. Thackeray.
Folkestone, September.
36 Onslow Square, October. My dear Old Alfred,
I owe you a letter of happiness and thanks. Sir, about three weeks ago, when I was ill in bed, I read the " Idylls of the King," and I thought, " Oh I must write to him now, for this pleasure, this delight, this splendour of happiness which I have been enjoying." But I should have blotted the sheets, 'tis ill writing on one's back. The letter full of gratitude never went as far as the post-office and how comes it now ?
D'abord, a bottle of claret (The landlord of the hotel asked me down to the cellar and treated me.) Then afterwards sitting here, an old magazine, Fraser^s Magazine^ 1850, and I come on a poem out of " The Princess " which says " I hear the horns of
^ For chapter on the '' Idylls,^ see Vol. 11., p. 121.
1869] LETTER FROM THACKERAY. 445
Elfland blowing blowing/' no, it's *' the horns of Elfland faintly blowing " (I have been into my bedroom to fetch my pen and it has made that blot), and, reading the lines, which only one man in the world could write, I thought about the other horns of Elfland blowing in full strength, and Arthur in gold armour, and Guinevere in gold hair, and all those knights and heroes and beauties and purple landscapes and misty gray lakes in which you have made me live. They seem like facts to me, since about three weeks ago (three weeks or a month was it ?) when I read the book. It is on the table yonder, and I don't like, somehow, to disturb it, but the delight and gratitude ! You have made me as happy as I was as a child with the Arabian Nights^ every step I have walked in Elfland has been a sort of Paradise to me. (The landlord gave two bottles of his claret and I think I drank the most) and here I have been lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful " Idylls," my thoughts being turned to you : what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy? Do you understand that what I mean is all true and that I should break out were you sitting opposite with a pipe in your mouth.' Gold and purple and diamonds, I say, gentlemen and glory and love and honour, and if you haven't given me all these why should I be in such an ardour of gratitude } But I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young man ; to write and think about it makes me almost young, and this I suppose is what I'm doing, like an after-dinner speech.
P.S. I thought the " Grandmother " quite as fine. How can you at 50 be doing things as well as at 35 .'
October i6th, (I should think six weeks after the writing of the above.)
The rhapsody of gratitude was never sent, and for a peculiar reason ; just about the time of writing I came to an arrangement with Smith and Elder to edit their new magazine, and to have a contribution from T. was the publishers' and editor's highest ambition. But to ask a man for a favour, and to praise and bow down before him in the same page seemed to be so like hypocrisy, that I held my hand, and left this note in my desk, where it has been lying during a little French-Italian-Swiss tour which my girls and their papa have been making.
Meanwhile S. E. and Co. have been making their own
446 HOME UFE AOT -IDTLIS.- [itti
proposals to you, and joa have replied not faYooiably I am
Sony to hear: but now there b no reason why yoa should not
have my homages, and I am just as thankful for the ** IdyDs,**
and love and admire them just as moch, as I did two months
ago when I began to write in that ardour of claret and gratitude.
If you can*t write for us you can't. If you can by chance some
day, and help an old friend, how pleased and happy I shall be!
This however must be left to fate and your convenience : I don't
intend to give up hope, but accept the good fortune if it comes.
I see one, two, three quarterlies advertized to-day, as all bringing
laurels to laureatus. He will not refuse the private tribute of an
old friend, will he ? You don't know how pleased the girls were
at Kensington t'other day to hear you quote their father's little
verses, and he too I daresay was not disgusted. He sends you
and yours his very best regards in this most heartfelt and
artless
(note of admiration)!
Always yours, my dear Alfred,
W. M. Thackerat.
To TV. Af. Thackeray.
FARRDrGroSD.
My dear Thackeray,
Should I not have answered you ere this 6th of November ? surely : what excuse ? none that I know of : except indeed, that perhaps your very generosity and boundlessness of approval made me in a measure shame- faced. I could scarcely accept it, being, I fancy, a modest man, and always more or less doubtful of my own eflForts in any line. But I may tell you that your little note gave me more pleasure than all the journals and monthlies and quarterlies which have come across me : not so much from your being the Great Novelist I hope as from your being my good old friend, or perhaps from your being both of these in one. Well, let it be. I have been ransacking all sorts of old albums and scrap books but cannot find anything worthy sending you.
1869] LETTER TO THACKERAY. 447
Unfortunately before your letter arrived I had agreed to give Macmillan the only available poem I had by me ("Sea Dreams ")\ I don't think he would have got it (for I dislike publishing in magazines) except that he had come to visit me in my Island, and was sitting and blowing his weed vis-^-vis. I am sorry that you have engaged for any quantity of money to let your brains be sucked periodically by Smith, Elder & Co. : not that I don't like Smith who seems from the very little I have seen of him liberal and kindly, but that so great an artist as you are should go to work after this fashion. When- ever you feel your brains as the " remainder biscuit," or indeed whenever you will, come over to me and take a blow on these downs where the air as Keats said is " worth sixpence a pint," and bring your girls too.
Yours always, A. Tennyson.
From the Duke of Argyll.
London, Jufy xi^th^ 1859. My dear Mr Tennyson,
I think my prediction is coming true, that your " Idylls of the King " will be understood and admired by many who are incapable of understanding and appreciating many of your other works.
Macaulay is certainly not a man incapable of understanding anything but I knew that his tastes in poetry were so formed in another line that I considered him a good test, and three days ago I gave him "Guinevere."
The result has been as I expected, that he has been delighted with it He told me that he had been greatly moved by it, and admired it exceedingly. Altho' by practice and disposition he is eminently a critic, he did not find one single fault Yesterday I gave him the " Maid of Astolat " with which he was delighted also.
I hear the article in the Edin, Review is not to contain
^ ^ Titbonus ^ was sent to Thackeray for the CornhiU^ February, i860.
448 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [l8M
much criticism, it consists to a great extent of long extracts. But I have not seen it myself, nor am I sure who wrote it
How are you standing this tropical heat, and Mrs Tennyson? Let us have a good account of yourselves.
This Peace is abominable, and you should be perpetually, telescope in hand, watching for the " Liberator of Italy," who has proclaimed to his soldiers that he stops because the contest is no longer in the interests of France!
Yours most sincerely, Argyll.
To the Duke of Argyll.
Farringford,
Monday^ July iSM, 1859.
My dear Duke,
Doubtless Macaulay's good opinion is worth having and I am grateful to you for letting me know it, but this time I intend to be thick-skinned; nay, I scarcely believe that I should ever feel very deeply the pen-punctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press, if they kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spitefully and personally at myself. I hate spite. ######
Yours ever, A. Tennyson. Best remembrances to the Duchess.
From the Rev. B. Jowett.
19 Gloucester Terrace,
July lytk, 1859. My dear Tennyson,
Thank you many times for your last : I have read it through with the greatest delight, the " Maid of Astolat " twice over, and it rings in my ears. "The Lily Maid" seems to mc the fairest, purest, sweetest love-poem in the English language. I have not seen any criticisms nor do I care about them. It moves me like the love of Juliet in Shakespeare (though that is
1869] JOWETT's opinion OF THE "IDYLLS." 449
not altogether parallel), and I do not doubt whatever opinions are expressed about it that it will in a few years be above criticism.
There are hundreds and hundreds of all ages (and men as well as women) who, though they have not died for love (have no intention of doing so), will find there a sort of ideal consola- tion of their own troubles and remembrances.
Of the other poems I admire "Vivien" the most (the naughty one), which seems to me a work of wonderful power and skill.
It is most elegant and fanciful. I am not surprised at your Delilah reducing the wise man, she is quite equal to it
The allegory in the distance greatly strengthens y also elevates^ the meaning of the poem.
I shall not bore you with criticisms. It struck me what a great number of lines —
He makes no friends, who never made a foe — ^ Then trust me not at all, or all in all —
will pass current on the lips of men, which I always regard as a great test of excellence, for it is saying the thing that everybody feels.
I am sure that the "Grandmother" is a most exquisite thing.
I hope you will find rest after toil and listen to the voice that says " Rejoice, Rejoice."
Next week I shall probably be in London. I am afraid that I shall not be able to manage going abroad. But I should like to come and look in upon you if you are at any house where it would be convenient to you to see me.
With most kind regards to Mrs Tennyson and love to the children,
Believe me ever most truly yours,
B. JOWETT.
^ This line my £&ther generally wrote in autograph albums.
T.L 99
450 HOME LIFE AND "IDYLLS." [l869
From Arthur H. Clough.
Council Office, i^thjufy, 1859. Dear Mrs Tennyson,
The Welsh books appeared suddenly one morning, by what agency I do not know, and I have already appeased my uncle's bibliomaniac fears by communicating the fact of their arrival.
The reception of the " Idylls of the King " will I hope satisfy all Farringford.
I have heard no words of dispraise : and in my own opinion they are just what we had a right to hope for, better, because more fully given, without any disparagement to what went before.
Faithfully yours, A. H. Clough.
From the Duke of Argyll.
July 20th, 1859.
My dear Mr Tennyson,
I hope you will give me note of your arrival in town.
The applause of the " Idylls " goes on crescendo, and so far as I can hear without exception. Detractors are silenced.
Macaulay has repeated to me several times an expression of his great admiration. Another well-known Author, himself a Poet, whom I shall not name, who heretofore could go no further than a half unwilling approval of the "Lotos-Eaters," has succumbed to the "Idylls," has laid down his arms, without reserve. I consider him a test and index of a large class of minds. I have heard of several other obdurate sinners who have been converted from the error of their ways.
Gladstone, who is not one of the class, has spoken to me, and has written to the Duchess of Sutherland that the impres> sion of the power and beauty of these Poems increases daily in reading them.
I am delighted, specially from my love of natural history, with some of your imagery from natural things.
The passage comparing the voice of Enid to the first heaxd song of the nightingale is singularly beautiful in expression. So
I860] LETTER TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. 45 1
is that passage comparing the dispersion of Geraint's foes to the shoals of fish among the " crystal dykes of Camelot."
By the bye I have always omitted to ask you what you mean in one of your old poems by "The Red-Cap^ whistled." I know of no such bird : don't you mean the Black-Q^jp^ which does whistle beautifully? The Golden-crested Wren is never called " Red-Cap/' nor can it be said to whistle, tho' it has a loud song.
L. Nap.'s explanation of the Peace is, I have no doubt, a tolerably correct account. But it will seem a bitter mockery to those whose " illusions " he encouraged, and now contemns.
Can you send me a copy of your song " The Great Name of England round and round " ? Do.
Yours ever, Argyll.
To the Duke of Argyll.
E. L. LushingtofCSf
Taml House, MAmsroNE,
/ufy 29M, 1859.
My dear Duke,
Your last note was very welcome to me and if I did not answer it earlier, why, I was all the more to blame ; answered partly it was by my wife's copy of the song * requested, which I hope arrived safely. She has set it to music far more to the purpose than most of Master Balfe's.
" Red-cap " is, or was when I was a lad, provincial for " Gold-finch " ; had I known it was purely provincial I should probably not have used it. Now the passage has stood so long that I am loth to alter it.
Ever yours, A. Tennyson.
^ Provincial name for the goldfinch. «*< Riflemen, Form I''
452 HOME UFE AND ^^WYILSJ^ [l8M
jFrom my fatkef^s mother.
S06B Masor, Well Waul
Monday^ Jam, lOlSi, i860.
Deabest Ally,
I received a nice kind note from Akm Ker a short time since, which I now enclose, thinking it will give thee pleasure to know what he says about thy last beautiful and interesting poems. It does indeed (as he supposes it would) give me the purest satisfaction to notice that a spirit of Christi- anity is perceptible through the whole volume. It gladdens my heart also to perceive that Alan seems to estimate it greatly on that account* O dearest Ally, how fervently have I prayed for years that our merciful Redeemer. would intercede with our Heavenly Father, to grant thee His Holy Spirit to urge thee to employ the talents He has given thee, by taking every opportunity of endeavouring to impress the precepts of His Holy Word on the minds of others. My beloved son, words are too feeble to express the joy of my heart in perceiving that thou art earnestly endeavouring to do so. Dearest Ally, there is nothing for a moment to be compared to the favour of God : I need not ask thee if thou art of the same opinion. Thy writings are a convincive proof that thou art My beloved child, when our Heavenly Father summons us hence, may we meet, and all that are dear to us, in that blessed state where sorrow is unknown, never more to be separated. I hope Emmy and thyself continue well, also the dear little boys. All here join me in kindest love to both.
Ever, dearest Ally,
Thy attached and loving mother,
E. Tennyson.
From J. Ruskin.
Strasburg. Dear Mr Tennyson,
I have had the ^' Idylls " in my travelling desk ever since I could get them across the water, and have only not written about them because I could not quite make up my mind about that increased quietness of style. I thought you would
1860] RUSKIN ON THE POEMS. 455
like a little to know what I felt about it, but did not quite know myself what I did feel.
To a certain extent you yourself of course know better wh»t the work is than anyone else, as all great artists do.
If you are satisfied with it, I believe it to be right Satisfied with bits of it you must be, and so must all of us, however much we expect from you.
The four songs seem to me the jewels of the crown, and bits come every here and there, the fright of the maid for instance, and the '^ In the darkness o'er her fallen head," which seem to me finer than almost all you have done yet Nevertheless I am not sure but I feel the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like to feel it^ Yet I am not a fair judge quite, for I am so much of a realist as not by any possibility to interest myseK much in an unreal subject to feel it as I should, and the very sweetness and stateliness of the words strike me all the more as pure workmanship.
As a description of various nobleness and tenderness the book is without price: but I shall always wish it had been nobleness independent of a romantic condition of externals m general
"In Memoriam," "Maud," "The Miller's Daughter," and such like will always be my own pet rhymes, yet I am quite prepared to admit this to be as good as any, for its own peculiar audience. Treasures of wisdom there are in it, and word- painting such as never was yet for concentration, nevertheless it seems to me that so great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past but on the living present For one hearer capable of feeling the depth of this poem I believe ten would feel a depth quite as great if the stream flowed through things nearer the hearer. And merely in the facts of modem life, not
^ So &r as the word arty as used here by Mr Ruskin, suggests that these Idylls were carefully elaborated, the suggestion is hardly in accordance with the £eict The more imaginative the poem, the less time it generally took him to compose. ^ Guinevere^ and ^ Elaine^ were certainly not elaborated, seeing that they were written, each of them, in a few weeks, and hardly corrected at all. My Either said that he often did not know why some passages were thought specially beautiful, until he had examined them. He added : ^ Perfection in art is periiaps more sudden sometimes than we think ; but then the long preparation for it, that imseen germination, thai is what we ignore and forget.^
454 HOME LIFE AND "" IDYXLS." [i860
drawing-room f onnal life, bat the far away and quite unknown growth of souls in and through any form of misery or servitude, there is an infinity of what men should be told, and what none but a poet can telL I cannot but think that the intense masterful and unerring transcript of an actuality, and the relation of a story of any real human life as a poet would watch and analyze it, would make all men feel more or less what poetry was, as they felt what Life and Fate were in their instant workings.
This seems to me the true task of the modem poet And I think I have seen faces, and heard voices by road and street side, which claimed or conferred as much as ever the loveliest or saddest of CameloL As I watch them, the feeling continuaUy weighs upon me, day by day, more and more, that not the g^rief of the world but the loss of it is the wonder of it. I see creatures so full of all power and beauty, with none to understand or teach or save them. The making in them of miracles and all cast away, for ever lost as far as we can trace. And no ** in memoriam."
I do not ask when you are likely to be in London for I know you do not like writing letters, and I know you will let Mrs Prinsep or Watts send me word about you, so that I may come and see you again, when you do come; and then on some bright winter's day, I shall put in my plea for Denmark HilL
Meanwhile believe me always
Faithfully and gratefully yours, J. Ruskin.
Pari of a letter from Aubrey de Vere.
iS6o.
Love to Alfred, from whom I hope to have more of those glorious chivalrous legends. ♦ ♦ ♦
Alfred seems to be founding a school just as Raffaelle and Titian founded their respective Roman and Venetian schools. There cannot be a truer tribute to genius than this. It proves that it has struck roots in the national mind.
I860] LETTER FROM THE PRINCE CONSORT. 455
From H.R.H. Prince Albert.
Buckingham Palace,
17M May^ i86o. My DEAR Mr Tennyson,
Will you forgive me if I intrude upon your leisure with a request which I have thought some little time of making, viz. that you would be good enough to write your name in the accompanying volume of your "Idylls of the King"? You would thus add a peculiar interest to the book, containing tho^e beautiful songs, from the perusal of which I derived the greatest enjoyment. They quite rekindle the feeling with which the legends of King Arthur must have inspired the chivalry of old, whilst the graceful form in which they are presented blends those feelings with the softer tone of our present age.
Believe me always yours truly, Albert.
From the Rev. Charles Kingsley.
EvERSLEY Rectory, Winchfield,
Nov. 10th, 1859. My dear Tennyson,
I was amused to-night at a burst of enthusiasm in
your behalf from a most unenthusiastic man (though a man of
taste and scholarship), Walter the proprietor of the Times, He
confest to having been a disbeliever in you, save in " Locksley
Hall," which he said was the finest modem lyric; but he
considered you had taken liberties, and so forth. But the.
"Idylls," he confest, had beaten him. He thought them the
finest modern poem. There was nothing he did not or would.
not say in praise of them. He now classed the four great
English poets as Shakespeare, Spenser, B)rron, Tennyson, and
so on, and so on, very pleasant to me though little worth to you.
But I like to tell you of a " jamjam efficaci do manus scientise "
from anyone who has not as yet appreciated you, to his own
harm. He did not write the disagreeable review of you in the
Times some years back. It was, I believe, a poor envious,
dyspeptic, poetaster parson, . I tell you this for fear you
should think Walter, who is really a fine fellow, had anything to
do with it
God bless you, C. Ki^Oi^v.^^.
456 HOME LIFE AND ''IDYLLS.'' [186O-
To the Duke of Argyll.
FilRRINGFORDy
Oct ird, 1859.
My dear Duke,
We are delighted to hear that your Duchess has added another scion to your race, and that mother and child are both prospering. I had fancied that the event would have come oflF while I was in Portugal (for in Portugal I have been), and made enquiries thereanent of Mr Henry Howard ^ but he could tell me nothing.
If I came back with "bullion" in the "Tagus," it was nowhere in my packages. I went to see that Cintra which Byron and Beckford have made so famous : but the orange-trees were all dead of disease, and the crystal streams (with the exception of a few sprinkling springlets by the wayside) either dried up, or diverted thro' unseen tunnels into the great aqueduct of Lisbon. Moreover the place is cockney, and, when I was there, was crammed with Lisbon fashionables and Portuguese nobility ; yet Cintra is not without its beauties, being a mountain of green pines rising out of an everywhere arid and tawny country, with a fantastic Moorish-looking castle on the peak, which commands a great sweep of the Atlantic and the mouth of the Tagus : here on the topmost tower sat the king (they say) day by day in the old times of Vasco da Gama watching for his return, till he saw him enter the river: there, perhaps, was a moment worth having been waited for. I made some pleasant acquaintances, but I could not escape autograph hunters ; a certain Don Pedro Something even telegraphed for one after I had returned to Lisbon.
As to Macaulay's suggestion of the Sangreal, I doubt whether such a subject could be handled in these days, without incurring a charge of irreverence. It would be
^ English Miniater at Lisbon in 1859.
I860] "THE PHILOSOPHER." 457
too much like playing with sacred things. The old writers believed in the Sangreal. Many years ago I did write " Lancelot's Quest of the Grail " in as good verses as I ever wrote, no, I did not write, I made it in my head, and it has now altogether slipt out of memory.
My wife, I am sorry to say, has been very unwell.
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
Unpublished Poem of this Period.
The Philosopher.
He was too good and kind and sweet, Ev'n when I knew him in his hour Of darkest doubt, and in his power,
To fling his doubts into the street.
Truth-seeking he and not afraid,
But questions that perplex us now —
What time (he thought) have loom or plough
To weigh them as they should be weighed?
We help the blatant voice abroad To preach the freedom of despair, And from the heart of all things fair
To pluck the sanction of a God.
i{
S( iLLV ISLF.
: '.'
*♦
It ■•
r
•.' h.vl [.H(;n the>»vicC''5> of the fir^t four " ' t .
• v.t my father's friends bcL't;c'i !.. '1' l;):l/" He reccved :i it*tter twin • -'c . • :! .^^ain vii'L^ing him to take up as hisiicxt > / viral", bill he ^ai ! he shunned handiii ,- ■" I ;>'M- that it i .ight seeni tu i^on.c a!r/ • He answered:
1 ^'
My :'* VR L>L*KF.,
I sympathised with you when I le..-*: «: MacaulayV dealli in t'-o Timis. Me was. was ho i.-x your ne>r-dMor noii^'i' 'iir? I can e:i^i!v ooncci\o vi..;: a loss )■■'".'• huist. hiv' liad in the want of his l..riii.v.* convers'^tion. I Ivi: i.y knuw him : met him ^'nce. I \' men^.ber. when H •'! l >i and Tuiizot were in his ronir-.mv Haliam nn^: .^how-M; Guizot the Houses of Parliair*.-:/ then buildii" ', Mto MaCviulay wont on Hke a caMrar for 111 i.our .'.; .i i;,i those two orrcai men, and. \\ht thev ricul t'oric. r.rnrd to me and snid, *' Good mov ing. 1 ar- hvijpv to have had the pleasure of mnkin your acquainiaT-ue," and strode away. Had I been piquablo man I. should ha. e been piqued, but I don • think I A a-;, f.;r r: e movement after all was amicable
45S
.1
I860] " BOADICEA." 459
Of the two books I should, I think, have chosen the Crabbe, though Macaulay's criticisms on poetry would be less valuable probably than his historical ones. Peace be with him !
As to the Sangreal, as I gave up the subject so many long years ago I do not think that I shall resume it. You will see a little poem of mine in the Comhill Magazine. My friend Thackeray and his publishers had been so urgent with me to send them something, that I ferreted among my old books and found this " Tithonus," written upwards of a quarter of a century ago, and now queerly enough at the tail of a flashy modem novel. It was originally a pendent to the " Ulysses " in my former volumes, and I wanted Smith to insert a letter, not of mine, to the editor stating this, and how long ago it had been written, but he thought it would lower the value of the contribution in the public eye. Read in Browning's Men and Women "Evelyn Hope'* for its beauty, and "Bishop Blougram's Apology " for its exceeding cleverness, and I think that you will not deny him his own. The Comhill Maga- zine gives a very pleasant account of Macaulay.
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
The Duke and the Duchess spent some days at Farringford, and were most emphatic that the " Grail " ought to be written forthwith. My father said that he was not " at present in the mood for it," and read aloud his " Boadicea," which he had now quite finished. He gloried in his new English metre, but he "feared that no one could read it except himself, and wanted someone to annotate it musically so that people could understand the rhythm." "If they would only read it straight like prose," he said, "just as it is written, it would come all right." Among other guests ^^&
460 TOUR IN CORNWALL AND THE SCILLY ISLES. [18OQ
Lord DufiFerin, full of Cynl Graham's discoveries of the white marble cities in the black basaltic land of the Hauran with their inscriptions in an unknown tongue. Then the missionary Dr WolflF stayed with us, recounting his hairbreadth escapes in Central Asia, and giving an awe-inspiring description of an earthquake in Bokhara.
It was not until August that my father was able to go on his summer tour to Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, in company with Woolner, Palgrave, Holman Hunt and Val Prinsep,
Afy fathet^s letter-diary. Tour in Cornwall and
the Scilly Isles.
August iStA. All Souls' Reading Room, Oxford. Before my departure Palgrave called with his Syrian brother, a very interesting man in an Eastern dress with a kind of turban, having just escaped from his convent in the Syrian Deserts where several of his fellow monks were massacred. Palgrave is obliged to stop for a week at Hampstead till the brother goes to Paris, where he will have an interview with the Emperor on the affairs of the East. I started off alone, and I believe that in a week's time Holman Hunt, Val Prinsep and Frank Palgrave will join me at Penzance. Woolner, like a good fellow, followed me here yesterday that I might not feel lonely, and this morning we break- fasted with Max Miiller, and are going to dine with him at 7.
August 2 1 St. Bideford. We came here last night at 7 o'clock. I and Woolner are going down the coast to Tintagel, where we shall stop till the others join us.
August 2yrd. Bude. Fine sea here, smart rain alternating with weak sunshine. Woolner is very kindly. We go off to-day to Boscastle which is three mQes from Tintagel.
1800] TINTAGEL. 46 1
August 2yd. Arrived at Tintagel, grand coast, furious rain. Mr Poelaur would be a good name to direct to me by.
August 25M. Tintagel. Black clifiFs and caves and storm and wind, but I weather it out and take my ten miles a day walks in my weather-proofs. Palgrave arrived to-day.
To Hallam.
Tintagel,
Aug. 2$fk, i860.
My dear Hallam,
I was very glad to receive your little letter. Mind that you and Lionel do not quarrel and vex poor mamma who has lots of work to do; and learn your lessons regularly ; for gentlemen and ladies will not take you for a gentleman when you grow up if you are ignorant. Here are great black clifiFs of slate-rock, and deep, black caves, and the ruined castle of King Arthur, and I wish that you and Lionel and mamma were here to see them. Give my love to grandpapa and to Lionel, and work well at your lessons. I shall be glad to find you know more and more every day.
Your loving papa, A. Tennyson.
August 28M. Tintagel. We believe that we are going to-morrow to Penzance or in that direction. We have had two fine days and some exceedingly grand coast views. Here is an artist, a friend of Woolner's (Inchbold), sketching now in this room. I am very tired of walking against wind and rain.
[Mr Palgrave writes : Following the publication of the first four " Idylls of the King" in 1859, when he was intending to write further Idylls, this was, perhaps, specially entitled to be named Tennyson's Arthurian journey.
At a sea inlet of wonderful picturesqueness, so grandly
462 TOUR IN CORNWALL AND THE SCILLY ISLES. [18OQ
modelled are the rocks which wall it, so translucently purple the' waves that are its pavement, — waves whence the " naked babe " Arthur came ashore in flame, — stand the time-eaten ruins of unknown date which bear the name Tintagel. To these of course we climbed, — descending from "the castle gateway by the chasm," and at a turn in the rocks meeting that ever graceful, ill-appreciated landscapist, Inchbold: whose cry of delighted wonder at sight of Tennyson still sounds in the sole survivor's ear. Thence, after some delightful wandering walks, by a dreary road (for such is often the character of central Cornwall), we moved to Camelford on the greatly-winding stream which the name indicates. Near the little town, on the edge of the river, is shown a large block of stone upon which legend places Arthur, hiding or meditating, after his last fatal battle. It lay below the bank; and in his eagerness to reach it and sit down (as he sat in 185 1 on that other, the Sasso di Dante by Sta. Maria del Fiore), Arthur's poet slipped right into the stream, and returned laughing to Camelford.
The next halting-place I remember was Penzance ; whence, by Marazion, we crossed to and saw our English smaller but yet impressive and beautiful St Michael's Mount ^.]
August ^isi. Union Hotel, Penzance. I am so very much grieved for poor Simeon's loss of his wife; it casts a gloom on my little tour: what will he do without her and with all those children ? I have now walked lo miles a day for lo days, equal icx>, and I want to continue doing that for some time longer. I am going to-morrow to Land's End and then I must return here, and then I go to the Scilly Isles and then again return here.
Se/>t. stA. Land's End Inn. I will write to Simeon to-day, tho' I rather shun writing to him on such a subject, for what can one say, what comfort can one give? We are here at this racketty, rather dirty inn, but we have had four glorious days and magnificetUly coloured seas. To-day the Scilly Isles look so dark and clear on the horizon that one expects rain.
1 Palgrave MS.
I860] THE SCILLY ISLES. 463
[I was struck — Mr Palgrave notes again — on the plateau of Sennen by the likeness between the masses of rock, piled up by Nature only, and those cromlechs which also occur in Corn- wall ; " Do you not remember that Wordsworth has a sonnet on this point ? " Tennyson said, alluding to that beginning
■
" Mark the concentred hazels... "
adding, " He seems to have been always before one in observa- tion of Nature^."]
Sept. 6th. Penzance. I start in an hour by the boat for the Scilly Islands. The weather is splendid, and the sea as calm as any lake shut in on all sides by hills. Woolner goes back to London and Palgrave continues with me.
Sept. <)th. St Mary's, Scilly Isles. Captain Tre- garthen, who has the packet and the hotel here, has brought me my letters : the packet only goes three times a week. I shall stop here till Wednesday; there are West Indian aloes here 30 feet high, in blossom, and out all the winter, yet the peaches won't ripen; vast hedges of splendid geraniums, a delight to the eye, yet the mulberry won't ripen. These Islands are very peculiar and in some respects very fine. I never saw anything quite like them.
Sept. nth. Three Tuns, Lizard. At the Lizard; and intend coming on to Falmouth. Hope to be at Brockenhurst next Saturday, but if not there, I shall have turned aside to see Avebury and Silbury Hill.
Sept. 20th. Falmouth. Have not found it easy to write every day in the bustle and bother of travellers' inns. I am now writing on my knees in my bedroom at a fishmonger's, there being no room at the hotel, and the whole town mad with a bazaar for riflemen, who get drunk every night and squabble and fight and
1 Palgrave MS.
464 TOUR IN CORNWALL AND THE SCILLY ISLES. [l80O
disgrace themselves and their corps. We left Hunt and Val Prinsep hard at work at the Lizard, sketching on a promontory.
[Mr Palgrave concludes his notes on this tour thus : From Falmouth^ a little river-steamer was to carry us to Tnuro. We sat on deck enjoying the fresh air and sight of the fine estuary. But upon l* incognito Tennyson had reckoned too soon. Our captain presently came forward with a tray and a squat bottle, and said with unimpeachable good manners that " he was aware how distinguished a passenger, etc., and that some young men sitting opposite, and he, would be much honoured if Mr Tennyson would take a tumbler of stout with them." With as much courteous ease as if he had been a royal prince he stepped forward, said a few words of graceful thanks, pleased, and looking so; bowed to the hospitable party; and drank off his glass to their good health.
Presently the Captain reappeared, and this time it was the ladies in the cabin who begged that the Laureate would only step down among them. But the height of that small place of refuge, Tennyson declared, would render the proposed exhibi- tion impossible ; might he not be kindly excused ? The good women however were not to be baulked ; and one after another presented her half-length above the little hatchway before us, gazed, smiled and retreated. " It was like the crowned figures who appear and vanish in Macbethy* he said ; and so, talking with our fellow-passengers and the captain, in due time we disembarked at Truro.
Next day a long and pleasant walk took us to Perran- porth, a little village on the coast, which here was a stretch of level golden sands, barred at each end by fine rocks. Some way hence, we were directed through a little labyrinth of dunes
1 Caroline Fox described my father on this tour in MemorUs of Old Friends: <* Tennyson is a grand specimen of a man, with a magnificent head set on his shoulders like the capital of a mighty pillar. Hb hair is long and wavy, and covers a massive head. He wears a beard and moustache, which one begrudges, as hiding so much of that firm, forcefiil, but finely chiselled mouth. His eyes are large, gray (?), and open wide when a subject interests him ; they are well shaded by the noble brow, with its strong lines of thought and suffering. I can quite understand Sam. Laurence calling it the best balance of head he had.ever seen."
I860] VERSE-MEMORANDA. 465
to the famous buried church of Perranzabuloe. Only a few sand-heaped lines of wall remain. But St Piran is assigned to the fifth century, and the church might be of Arthur's age, if we place him about that period^.]
A vivid picture of my father, from a letter addressed to my mother (23rd Sept. i860) by Woolner, may be added :
** I expect idling about so long will make his brain so fertile that when he gets back to Farringford he will do an immense deal of work. He was physically better, there can be no question, for he actually ate breakfasts ! and partook of tarts not once but twice at dinner ! which he had not done before for many years : and his face had grown a reddish bronze, a very healthy colour ; and he was perpetually making jokes at expense of Palg^ve, or at mine, and taking long walks, and swimming, and not smoking much, and drinking scarcely any wine. So you may consider all this as flourishing."
In my father's note-book are written as below the following Verse- Memoranda of tours in Cornwall, Isle of Wight and Ireland*.
{Babbicombe) Like serpent-coils upon the deep.
{Torquay) As the little thrift
Trembles in perilous places o'er the deep,
{Front the Old Red Sandstone)
As a stony spring Blocks its own issue (tho' it makes a fresh one of course).
{Fowey) A cow drinking from a trough on the hill-side. The netted beams of light played on the wrinkles of her throat.
* Palgrave MS.
^ When I was walking with my fother almost for the last time, he said to me : '< I generally take my nature-similes direct from my own observation of nature, and sometimes jot them down, and if by chance I find that one of my similes is like that in any author, my impulse is not to use that simile.^ If he was in the vein during a walk, he would make dozens of similes that were never chronicled.
T. I. 30
466 TOUR IN CORNWALL AND THE SCILLY ISLES. [iSeO
' {Cornwall) The wildflower, called lady's finger, of a golden yellow when open'd, is, unopen'd, of a rich orange red, frequently at least in Cornwall when I observed it.
The open sea.) Two great ships
That draw together in a calm.
{Bonchurch) A little salt pool fluttering round a stone upon the shore.
(/. 0/ Wight.)
As those that lie on happy shores and see Thro' the near blossom slip the distant sail.
(Park House.) Before the leaf,
When all the trees stand in a mist of green.
After his tour in Ireland he had written on the same page:
(Valencia.) Claps of thunder on the cli£Fs
Amid the solid roar.
(Bray Head.)
O friend, the great deeps of Eternity
Roar only round the wasting clifiFs of Time.
(The river Shannon^ on the rapids)
Ledges of battling water.
CHAPTER XXIL
FARRINGFORD FRIENDS. THE PYRENEEa DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT.
1860-1862.
Some of the journals of this period have been mislaid, and Mrs Bradley has allowed me to make use of the Reminiscences written by her during the visits which she and the present Dean of Westminster paid to us at Farringford. They begin with the first impression of my father :
Here is Farringford, Tennyson's home, with its "careless ordered garden close to the ridge of a noble down " buried in trees. He invited Granville to dine with him to meet " Lear the artist, not the king," at Farringford two or three times, and Granville has had walks and talks with him and brings away memories full of pleasure and interest. To have come near the man and found in him all one could have desired in a great poet I I must write down my first sight of him. I was on the top of the stack in the yard having a birthday feast, very gay under a blue tent with decorations of flowers, etc. A carriage drove up to the little gate of the yard, I could not see who it was but guessed it was he. He came to the stack and looked up. I saw a tall large figure, cloak and large black wide-awake. He had no beard or moustache, I recollect being impressed with the beauty and power of his mouth and chin.
His face is full of power and thought, a deep furrow runs from nose to chin on either side, and gives a peculiar expression to the face, a lofty forehead adds to this. I remember the splendour of his eyes. He asked me who I was and told me
467 30— a
468 MRS BRADL£Y*S REMINISCENCES. [i860
to " throw the little maid into his arms " promising to catch her. He asked Edith how old she was, she said "thwee to-day." He said, " Then you and I have the same birthday, August 6th." He did not say much, but walked into the little parlour. Granville came in and they talked a little. Mr Tennyson took up the books on the table and remarked to himself about them.
He and Granville have been on an expedition to Brooke Bay, geologising, botanising, poetising, talking of everything great and small, of life inward and outward, at home and abroad, of religious and social difficulties; they talked from 12 noon to lo p.m. almost incessantly this day, Mr Tennyson walking back with him to the Warren Farm still talking; Granville says that beneath all the slight allusions to various subjects in his poems lies a mine of knowledge. " He speaks of poetry as a great master only can do."
i860. Mr Tennyson has read " Maud " to us. He is a little vexed at the reception of " Maud." He said : " You must always stand up for * Maud * when you hear my pet bantling abused. Perhaps that is why I am sensitive about her. You know mothers always make the most of a child that is abused." He commented on the poem as he read, pointed out certain beauties of metre and meaning which he admired himself. He excuses all that people pronounce sardonic in his poems, by saying, he does not cry out against the age as hopelessly bad, but tries to point out where it is bad in order that each individual may do his best to redeem it; as the evils he denounces are individual, only to be cured by each man looking to his own heart. He denounced evil in all its shapes, especially those considered venial by the world and society.
Speaking of Alexander Smith: " He has plenty of promise, but he must learn a different creed to that he preaches in those lines beginning * Fame, fame, thou art next to God.* Next to God — next to the Devil say I. Fame might be worth having if it helped us to do good to a single mortal, but what is it ? only the pleasure of hearing oneself talked of up and down the street"
\PeatJi5 Jest-Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes he also praised.] He tells stories very well, ghost and other stories, and has plenty of humour. Amongst others he told us several stories of queer letters he has had from all sorts of people, companies, associations, etc. One young lady wrote imploring him to write some poetry for her to produce at a picnic when everyone was
im\ COVENTRY PATMORE. 469
to recite an original poem ! He said the deceit of passing o£F his poem as her own disgusted him, on the other hand he thought it plucky to tell him what she meant to do, and he would have written it for her, but unfortunately she signed her note " Kate " and sent no address.
Those evenings when the poet, sitting in his old oak arm- chair after dinner in the drawing-room, talked of what was in his heart, or read some poem aloud, with the landscape lying before us like a beautiful picture framed in the dark-arched bow- window, are never to be forgotten. His moods are so variable, his conversation so earnest, his knowledge of all things he writes about is so wide and minute. It is a rare treat to be in his domestic circle, where he talks freely and brightly without shyness or a certain morbidity which oppresses him occasionally in society. Crabbe, Gray and Keats were the chief poets he read to us.
There is a look in his face like a bright burning light behind it, like an inward fire that might consume his very life.
The reference in the following letter from my father is to an article on " English Metrical Critics " contributed by Mr Patmore to the North British Review for 1857 (Vol. xxvii. pp. 1 2 7-1 61).
This is the passage referred to :
The six-syllable " iambic '' is the most solemn of all our English measures. It is scarcely fit for anything but a dirgje ; the reason being, that the final pause in this measure is greater, when compared with the length of the line, than in any other verse. Here is an example, which we select on account of the peculiar illustration of its nature as a " dimeter brachy-catalectic,^ which is supplied by ^t filling up of the measure in the seventh line:
How strange it is to wake
And watch, while others sleep, Till sight and hearing ache
For objects that may keep The awful inner sense
Unroused, lest it should mark The life that haunts the emptiness And horror of the dark.
470 SPECIMENS OF METRE. [iMO
We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as the seventh, m order to change this verse from the slowest and most mournful, to the most rapid and hig^b-spirited of all English metres, the common eight-syllable qnatrain ; a measure particularly recommended by the early critics, and continually chosen by poets of all times for erotic poetry, on acxoont of its joyous air.
It will be seen that my feither's second specimen is constructed by '' filling up " Mr Patmore's lines in the manner that he suggests.
My DEAR C. P.
Specimen of the ** wtast saletmn " Eng^Udk wuire.
How glad am I to walk
With Susan on the shore I How glad am I to talk!
I kiss her o'er and o'er. I clasp her slender waist.
We kiss, we are so fcHod, When she and I are thus embraced.
There s not a joy beyoncL
Is this C P/s most sdenm ?
Speciwun of the "^ mast kigk-spiribd^
How strange it is» O God, to wake.
To watch and wake while otbos Till heart and sight and hearing ache
For common objects that would keep Our awful inner ghostly saase
Unroused, lest it by chance skoold mark: The life that haonts die enqpdness
And horrors of the foimiess dark»
Is this CX P.'s rapid and higk-qpirited ? A. X.
186l] "THE NORTHERN FARMER." 47 1
1861.
January. The Bensons^ and Bradleys here. My father spoke of seeing Freshwater cliffs and the Needles from Bournemouth, and said, " The Isle of Wight looked like a water-lily on a blue lake." Talking of some poems published by an advanced young lady, which were instantly suppressed and the edition bought up by her friends, he quoted two or three passages to show how she had poetic perception rendered worthless by bad taste. One line ran: "whose looks were well- manured with loveV
January 22nd. My father said on the evening when the Bradleys were leaving : " You are going away — it is taking away a bit of my sunshine: I've been cutting down trees to let in some, and now you are taking away a bit of it." He continued: "All that sounds like flattery: there is no need for us to make fine speeches. By this time you know I never do, and it is just a plain truth that your going takes away some of my sunshine."
On Feb. 17th my father told my mother about his plan for a new poem, " The Northern Farmer."
By the evening of Feb. i8th he had already written down a great part of " The Northern Farmer " in one of the MS books bound in blue and red paper (which my mother always made for him herself). They also read of Sir Gareth in the Morte (C Arthur. About this time we went with my father to the National Gallery to see what he called " some of the great pictures of the world," the
^ The late Archbishop of Canterbury and his wife.
^ I may observe that my father was by no means a severe critic of the poems sent him. I remember his saying to Millais (about 1879) * — '^The average poems which I get are not at all bad, but there is just the something, I suppose, wanted, that I cannot explain.^^ Millais assured him that he found the same difficulty in criticizing pictures by young painters, that there was a good level of performance throughout their work| yet somehow felling short of excellence.
472 TOUR IN THE PYRENEES. [186I
"Titians," the new " Veronese \'' and the portrait of Ariosto.
In March my mother received a letter from Mr Jowett, a passage in which refers to some advice my father had given him with regard to the manner of expressing his theological opinions.
Baluol.
I had not the courage to follow Mr Tennyson's advice about the Essay *. It was, however, of great use to me, for I have modified the objectionable passages. I will send you a copy in a few days.
Believe me ever most truly yours,
B. JOWETT.
In May it was decided that my father should receive a degree at Cambridge, but we were unable to go fur- ther than Oatlands Park Hotel, for he had such a bad attack of palpitation of the heart that Cambridge had to be given up. After a few days spent in walking to Hampton Court and about the country round, we re- turned to Farringford, my father stopping at Winchester and Lyndhurst on the way.
Auvergne and the Pyrenees {July and August).
In the summer of 1861 we travelled in Auvergne and the Pyrenees. Some things we could not but be glad to have seen, but the difficulty of getting rooms, carriages, or even donkeys to ride in those days, and the impossi- bility of finding food not soaked in garlic, took away much of our pleasure.
The Cathedral at Bourges, its great pillars and its gorgeous windows, was what struck my father most on the journey out. On our arrival at Clermont, the comet
^ The great picture, << Darius and hb family before Alezandery^ brought from the Pisani Palace, Venice, in 1857.
* The famous essay in Essays and Reviews.
186l] THE PYRENEES. 473
was flaring over the market-place. Here we should have been content to stay, had it not been for the bad drainage. My father and Mr Dakyns ^ climbed the Puy de Dome and several of the extinct volcanoes in the neighbour- hood. Afterwards we drove to Mont Dore and La Bourboule ; the plain of Clermont, where Peter the Hermit preached the First Crusade, and over which we looked during the drive, is very fine. At Mont Dore, while my father was reading some of the Iliad out aloud to us, little boys came and stood outside the window in open- mouthed astonishment. He took long walks there by the Dordogne, and one day when he came in from his walk we heard him call " Clough, come upstairs," and in walked Mr Clough. My father, Mr Clough and Mr Dakyns made many expeditions to waterfalls and up mountains, Mr Clough riding. We were delighted with the gorgeous meadows of forget-me-nots, and yellow anemones. We left Mr Clough at Mont Dore and drove to Tulle and Perigueux, a quaint place with its old Roman Tower and Cathedral with grass-grown tower, church of St Etienne, and city walls. Thence to Bordeaux, Tarbes, Bagneres de Bigorre where there was a magnificent thunderstorm at night, forked lightning of different colours striking the mountains on either hand. From this place my father and Mr Dakyns made an expedition up the Pic du Midi. When the climbers reached the summit, three great eagles, they said, kept swooping round without any perceptible movement of wing. On our drive from Bigorre to Bagnferes de Luchon, a brigand cut one of our trunks from behind the carriage and was making off with it, when our driver looked round and caught sight of him, whereat the rascal ran off into the mountains, our driver cracking his whip at him and shouting out volleys of break-jaw oaths. At Bagnferes
^ Mr Dakyns had recently come to be our tutor ; previously my mother had taught my brother and myself.
I86l] THE "STATELY PINE " IN "THE PRINCESS." 475
ing the voice of the torrent seemingly sound deeper as the night grew" {in memory of his visit here with Arthur Hallam).
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.
My father, Mr Clough and Mr Dakyns climbed to the Lac de Gaube, a blue, still lake among fir woods, where my father quoted to Mr Clough the simile of the " stately pine " in " The Princess," which he made from a pine here on an island in mid-stream between two cataracts. More pines he found had grown by the side of this solitary pine that he remembered years ago.
And standing like a stately Pine Set in a cataract on an island-crag. When storm is on the heights, and right and left Suck'd from the dark heart of the long hills roll The torrents, dash'd to the vale: and yet her will Bred will in me to overcome it or fall. My father clambered on to the Lac Bleu; he said that the water was marvellously blue except where the shadow of the mountains made parts of the lake purple. My mother writes in her journal :
" We had a sad parting from Mr Clough at Pau. There could not have been a gentler, kinder, more unselfish or more thoughtful companion than he has been. Among other kind things he corrected the boys' little journals for them; we called him the 'child-angel.'
years ago; and nalU finds great pleasure ia the place: they stayed here and al Cautereti. i,^ • -erv fond of this place evidenUy."
" Ornish,.. ^^ «e ^ « h^ g^t p^tic feeling : he r^ me then h«
' In Mar, Mag„o , - "J '^Vj uke a child over it." „ ,„
M "Lf'^'^'^Z Tt^t he had^tte^"twoand thirty year, ago jn hi. "M >long o, \««d \^ «^ of „ ^„ ^d thirty year, ago," and ^ U^ « 'S93 »/.he(i » ^aUcy *"r_» he W inaccuracy. 1 persuaded h m to
pmeat Jbni,.™***^, .^d, '^'i.!: .r^}'^'?.^ «aa more melodioto.
476 LETTER TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. [iMl
After stopping at Pau for a few days we journeyed hmne by Dax, St Emilion, Liboume, Tours and Amiens : and on our return A. said to me : * I have seen many things in this tour I shall like to remember.'"
My father wrote to the Duke of Argyll on his return :
Thx TkifPLEy London, i86i.
My DEAR Duke,
I had intended to write yesterday so that my answer might have reached Qiveden on the loth, and I scarce know why I did not: perhaps because in these chambers I had lighted on an old and not unclever novel Zohrab the Hostage ; partly perhaps because I had fallen into a muse about human vanities and '' the glories of our blood and state " (do you know those grand old lines of Shirley's ?)• This must have been suggested by the progress of His Majesty the Mayor down the Strand, where I was entangled for half an hour in a roaring crowd and hardly escaped unbruised; — however, what with the novel and what with the musing fit, I let the post slip ; but this morning let me say that I am grateful for the enquiring after myself and mine: of myself indeed I have no good account to render, being very far from well, living at a friend's rooms here in the Temple, and dancing attendance on a doctor. France, I believe overset me, and more especially the foul ways and unhappy diet of that charming Auvergne : no amount of granite craters or chestnut-woods, or lava-streams, not the Puy de Dome which I climbed, nor the Glen of Royat, where I lived, nor the plain of Clermont seen from the bridge there, nor the still more magnificent view of the dead volcanoes from the ascent to Mont Dore could make amends for those drawbacks : so we all fell sick by turns : my wife is better since our return, and the boys are well enough, tho' they suffered too at the time ; but I remain wilK a torpid liver, not having much pleasure
186l] FEARS FOR FRESHWATER. 477
in anything : yet I can still grieve with my friends' griefs,
and therefore I am sorry for the occasion which exiles
your good and kind Duchess, tho' it be but for this
December. I am sure the Duchess will sympathise with
my disgust at having my Freshwater (where I had
pitched my tent, taken with its solitariness) so polluted
and defiled with brick and mortar, as is threatened ; they
talk of laying out streets and crescents, and I oscillate
between my desire of purchasing land at a ruinous price
in order to keep my views open, and my wish to fly the
place altogether. Is there no millionaire who will take
pity on the wholesome hillside and buy it all up ?
"Boadicea," no, I cannot publish her yet, perhaps
never, for who can read her except myself ? I have half
consented to write a little ode on the opening of the
International Exhibition. The commissioners prest me :
I should never have volunteered; for I hate a subject
given me, and still more if that subject be a public one.
Present my best remembrances to your Duchess and to
[her mother] the Duchess of Sutherland. I am half
afraid to inquire after her Grace's eyesight lest I should
hear ill news.
Yours, my dear Duke, always,
A. Tennyson.
In September Lord Dufiferin wrote :
Clandeboy, Belfast, Sept. i^tk, 1861.
My dear Mr Tennyson,
I wonder if you will think me very presumptuous for doing what at last, after many months' hesitation, I have determined to do.
You must know that here in my park in Ireland there rises a high hill, from the top of which I look down not only on an extensive tract of Irish land, but also on St George's Channel, a long blue line of Scotch coast, and the mountains of the Isle of Man.
478 "Helen's tower,** [isci
On the summit of this hill I have built an old-world tower which I have called after my mother " Helen's Tower."
In it I have placed on a golden tablet the birthday verses which my mother wrote to me on the day I came of age, and I have spared no pains in beautifying it with all imaginable devices. In fact my tower is a little " Palace of Art." Beneath is a rough outline of its form and situation.
Now there is only one thing wanting to make it a perfect little gem of architecture and decoration and that is '*a voice'' It is now ten years since it was built and all that time it has stood silent Yet if he chose there is one person in the world able to endow it with this priceless gift, and by sending me some little short distich for it to crown it for ever with a glory it cannot otherwise obtain, and render it a memorial of the personal friend- ship which its builder felt for the great poet of our age.
Yours ever, Dufferin.
In answer my father sent the following lines, and annotated, as below, the words "recurring Paradise":
Helenas Tower.
Helen's Tower, here I stand, Dominant over sea and land. Son's love built me and I hold Mother's love engrav'n in gold. Love is in and out of time, I am mortal stone and lime. Would my granite girth were strong As either love to last as long! I should wear my crown entire To and thro' the Doomsday fire. And be found of angel eyes In earth's recurring Paradise ^
1 The £a.ncy of some poets and theologians that Paradise is to be the renovated earth, as, I dare say, you know.
The death of the Prince Consort in December my
186l] DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. 479
father felt was a great loss to Britain and the Empire. He sent the first copies of his Dedication of the "Idylls" to the Princess Alice with the following letter :
Madam,
Having heard some time ago from Sir C. B. Phipps that your Royal Highness had expressed a strong desire that I should in some way " idealize " our lamented Prince, and being at that time very unwell, I was unwilling to attempt the subject, because I feared that I might scarce be able to do it justice ; nor did I well see how I should idealize a life which was in itself an ideal.
At last it seemed to me that I could do no better than dedicate to his memory a book which he himself had told me was valued by him. I am the more em- boldened to send these lines to your Royal Highness, because having asked the opinion of a lady who knew and truly loved and honoured him, she gave me to understand by her reply that they were true and worthy of him : whether they be so or not, I hardly know, but if they do not appear so to your Royal Highness, forgive me as your Father would have forgiven me.
Though these lines conclude with an address to our beloved Queen I feel that I cannot do better than leave the occasion of presenting them to the discretion of your Royal Highness.
Believe me, as altogether sympathizing with your sorrow.
Your Royal Highness'
faithful and obedient servant,
A. Tennyson.
480 LETTER FROM PRINCESS ALICE. [l882
1862.
Jan. ^th. My father recited in a rolling voice his new Ode for the opening of the Exhibition in the summer ^ He explained that the rhythm and composi- tion were hampered by the necessity of arranging it for a choir of 4000 voices : " I think for that kind of Ode the wild irregular bursts are an addition to its eflfective- ness." The lines on the death of the Prince Consort had to be put in after the first draft was written. My father was deeply grieved, not only by the death of the Prince, but also by the deaths of his two friends Clough and Godley. He wrote: "We have lost Clough: he died at Florence of a relapse of malaria-fever: it gave me a great shock. I see that Godley too has gone : so we fall, one by one."
Jan. igth. Princess Alice wrote to my father about the Dedication of the " Idylls " to the Prince Consort :
If words could express thanks and real appreciation of lines so beautiful, so truly worthy of the great pure spirit which in- spired the author, Princess Alice would attempt to do it; — but these failing, she begs Mr Tennyson to believe how much she admires them, and that this just tribute to the memory of her beloved Father touched her deeply. Mr Tennyson could not have chosen a more beautiful or true testimonial to the memory of him who was so really good and noble, than the dedication of the * Idylls of the King ' which he so valued and admired Princess Alice transmitted the lines to the Queen, who desired her to tell Mr Tennyson, with her sincerest thanks, how much moved she was on reading them, and that they had soothed her aching, bleeding heart. She knows also how he would have admired them.
^ Sung May i, 1862 ; set by Stemdale Bennett. One newspaper re- ported that the poet-laureate was present, ''dothed in his green ^^*-'" (probably a misprint for ''bays**).
1862] LETTER FROM THE CROWN PRINCESS OF PRUSSIA. 48 1
The Crown Princess of Prussia also wrote :
February 2$rd, 1862.
The first time I ever heard the " Idylls of the King " was last year, when I found both the Queen and Prince quite in rapt- ures about them. The first bit I ever heard was the end of '* Guinevere," the last two or three pages : the Prince read them to me, and I shall never forget the impression it made upon me hearing those grand and simple words in his voice ! He did so admire them, and I cannot separate the idea of King Arthur from the image of him whom I most revered on earth !
I almost know the " Idylls of the King " by heart now : they are really sublime !
Surely it must give the Author satisfaction to think that his words have been drops of balm on the broken and loving hearts of the widowed Queen and her orphan children.
Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, Princess Royal.
Even the "calm Spedding" wrote enthusiastically about the " Dedication " :
The thing I had to say was merely that the Dedication was, and continues to be, the most beautiful and touching thing of the kind that I ever read, to which I have nothing to add except that I find tAat to be the general opinion of men and women within my small circle of acquaintance. Not that I have heard it much talked of. But I think that is because people are afraid of not meeting with the sympathy they require in such a case. With some of my most intimate friends, whom I was frequently meeting, not a word passed about it for weeks, till at last some accident brought it shyly out, and we found we had been all the time thinking exactly alike.
Hitherto I have enjoyed the quiet dignity belonging to the editor of a book of good repute which everybody is willing to be thought familiar with, but nobody reads, so the critics have taken their information from the preface, and passed me to the respect- able shelf with compliments. But now I come on ground [the Life of Francis Bacon] where they have opinions of their own, and must be prepared for the rougher side of the critic tongue. T. I. 31
482 LETTERS. [l862
Of all creatures that f^ed upon the earth, the professional critic is the one whose judgment I least value for any purpose except advertisement, but of all writers, the one whom he sits in judg- ment on is also the one whom he is least qualified to assume a superiority over. For is it likely that a man, who has written a serious book about anything in the world, should not know more about that thing than one who merely reads his book for the purpose of reviewing it ? But so it must be : and a discreet man must just let it be. What I want to know is whether men and women and children who care nothing about me, but take an intelligent interest in the subject, find the book readable. What its other merits are nobody knows so well as [I].
Letters to the Duke of Argyll.
Farringford, Feb, 1862.
My dear Duke,
Many thanks for your very interesting letter. Very touching is what you tell me about the Queen. I am of course exceedingly gratified that anything which I have written should have the power to console one whom we all love; strange that a book^ which, when it first appeared, was pronounced by more than one clergyman as Pantheistic, if not, as (I think) one wiseacre com- mented on it. Atheistic, should have such a power, but after all it is very little that words can do. Time, time !
I have written out for the Princess Royal a morsel from " Guinevere." I do so hate rewriting my own things that my pen refuses to trace the " Dedication.*'
Her critique on the " Idylls " is enthusiastic, and mingled up with the afifection of her father, as I would wish it to be. As to joining these with the " Morte d' Arthur," there are two objections, — one that I could scarcely light upon a finer close than that ghostlike passing away of the king, arid the other that the " Morte "
^ " In Memoriaxn.'*
1862] AT WORK ON "THE FISHERMAN." 483
is older in style \ I have thought about it and arranged all the intervening Idylls, but I dare not set to work for fear of a failure, and time lost. I am now about my " Fisherman," which is heroic too in its way.
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
If you call me Mr Tennyson any longer, I think that I must Your-grace you till the end of the chapter.
Monday, March yrd^ 1862.
My dear Duke,
I have been out on a visit (a very unusual proceeding on my part), and on returning found your letter, which a little dismayed me, for, as you in the prior one had bound me by no promise of secrecy, I, in talking of Her Majesty and her sorrow, did say to two friends, whom I bound by such a promise, that she had found comfort in reading " In Memoriam," and had made the private markings therein.
I don't suppose much harm would result even if these broke their promise, for that is all that could be reported ; still I am vexed, because if the Queen heard of the report she might fancy that her private comments were public prey. As to those very interesting ones communi- cated in your last, whether you had bound me to secrecy or not, I should not have dreamt of repeating them : they are far too sacred ; and possibly your caution of silence only refers to these.
I hope so. I think it must be so. I wrote off the very day I returned to both my friends, urging them to abide by their promise, for in these days of half- unconscious social treachery and multitudinous babble I felt that I ought to make assurance doubly sure. You can scarce tell how annoyed I have been. I hope the
* " * The Coining and the Passing of Arthur ' are simpler and more severe in style, as dealing with the awfiilness of Birth and Death." A. T.
484 LETTERS. [I86S
Princess Royal got my note and inclosure, but she has not acknowledged it My letters, I believe, have ere this been opened and stopt at our little Yarmouth P. O. but not in the present Postmaster's time.
My best remembrances to the Duchess,
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
March 26thj 1862.
My dear Duke,
I am a shy beast and like to keep in my burrow. Two questions, what sort of salutation to make on entering Her^ private room? and whether to retreat backward ? or sidle out as I may ?
I am sorry to hear that you were the worse for your journey. I myself am raven-hoarse with cold.
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
April, 1862.
My dear Duke,
As you were kind enough to say that you would mention Woolner's name to the Queen, I send a photograph of a work of his, which Gladstone, who saw it the other day, pronounced the first thing he had seen after the antique. The children are Thomas Fairbaim's, deaf and dumb, not pretty certainly, but infinitely pathetic.
I do not say, show this to her Majesty, you know best, but admit that myself and Gladstone are justified in our admiration.
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
^ The Qaeen^s.
1802] THE QUEEN. 485
My fathet^s first visit to the Queen^ April, 1862^, after the death of the Prince Consort.
A. was much aflfected by his interview with the Queen. He said that she stood pale and statue-like before him, speaking in a quiet, unutterably sad voice. '* There was a kind of stately innocence about her." She said many kind things to him, such as "Next to the Bible * In Memoriam ' is my comfort." She talked of the Prince, and of Hallam, and of Macaulay, and of Goethe, and of Schiller in connection with him, and said that the Prince was so like the picture of Arthur Hallam in " In Memoriam," even to his blue eyes. When A. said that he thought that the Prince would have made a great king, she answered, " He always said that it did not signify whether he did the right thing or did not, so long as the right thing was done."
A. said, " We all grieve with your Majesty," and the Queen replied, " The country has been kind to me, and I am thankful."
When the Queen had withdrawn. Princess Alice came in with Princess Beatrice.
After the interview my father wrote to Lady Augusta Bruce * :
FARRINGFORDy April Xlth^ 1 862.
My dear Lady Augusta,
Accept my very best thanks for your kind letter. I perceive that it was written on the evening of that day when I called at Osborne, but I received it only yesterday; then I thought that I would wait till
^ This account was written down by my mother immediately after my fiither^s return from Osborne.
^Afterwaitb the wife of Dean Stanley, then Lady-in-Waiting to the Qu<
486 LETTERS. [l8«2
the prints ^ arrived, but as they have not, I will not delay my answer.
I was conscious of having spoken with considerable emotion to the Queen, but I have a very imperfect recollection of what I did say. Nor indeed — which perhaps you may think less excusable — do I very well recollect what Her Majesty said to me : but I loved the voice that spoke, for being very blind I am much led by the voice, and blind as I am and as I told Her I was, I yet could dimly perceive so great an expression of sweet- ness in Her countenance as made me wroth with those imperfect cartes de visite of H.M. which Mayall once sent me. Will you say, as you best know how to say it, how deeply grateful I am to Her Majesty for the prints of Herself and of Him which She proposes to send me, and how very much I shall value Her Gift.? I was charmed with Princess Alice. She seemed to me what Goethe calls eine Natur. Did he not say that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a woman ? and the little Beatrice with her long tresses was very captivat- ing. Thank you also for what you tell me of your own family. True, as you write, I often receive similar com- munications, but the value of these depends on the value of those from whom they come. I often scarce believe that I have done anything, especially when I meet with too flowery compliments : but when I know that I am spoken to sincerely, as by your Ladyship, I lift my head a little, and rejoice that I am not altogether useless.
Believe me, yours very truly,
A. Tennyson.
1 Portraits of the Qoeen and Prince Consort.
CHAPTER XXIII.
DERBYSHIRE AND YORKSHIRE.
LETTERS.
1862-1864^
During this summer, after finishing his "Enoch Arden^" or "The Fisherman" as he called it then, my father went with Palgrave for a tour to Derbyshire and Yorkshire. On his return I remember hearing him express delight at the beauties of H addon Hall, and at the glories of the Peak cavern. The guide had asked the travellers, before entering the cavern, at what scale they would wish to see the Great Hall illuminated, for when the Emperor of Russia had been there, he had chosen the most magnificent of the illuminations offered. My father answered : " Let us be as grand as Emperors for once " : and Palgrave and he were amply rewarded by the wonderful colour-effects produced, and especially by the display of the crimson fire. From Castleton they went to Ripon, Leybum, Middleham, Wensleydale, Bolton, and Skipton. My father told me that it was at Middleham Castle he had made the lines in " Geraint and Enid " :
And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliJff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers.
^ See Appendix, p. 511, for Reminiscences by Thomas Wilson and William AUingham, 1863-64.
* See Fitzgerald's ^ Hints for < Enoch Arden '^ in Appendix, P* S^S*
4«7
488 FALSE REPORT OF A BARONETCY. [idtO-
At Christmas a greeting from Edward Fitzgerald came:
Market Rise, WooDBRiDGSy 1862.
Let me hear how you both are and your boys, and where you have been this summer.
I have as usual, nothmg to tell of myself : boating all the summer and reading Clarissa Harlowe since; you and I used to talk of the book more than 20 years ago. I believe I am better read in it than almost any one in existence now. No wonder, for it is almost intolerably tedious and absurd. But I can't read the Adam Bedes^ Daisy Chains^ etc. at all : I look at my row of Sir Walter Scott, and think with comfort that I can always go to him of a winter evening, when no other book comes to hand.
I think you must come over here one summer-day, not till summer, but before more summers are gone. Else, who knows } Do you smoke ? I sometimes talk with seafaring men who come from Boston in billyboys, and from Goole, and other places in the Humber, and then I don't forget the coast of Locksley Hall.
1863.
In January my father wrote to Frederick Locker, sending at the same time a volume of his poems for his daughter Eleanor :
FARRINGFORDy
Jan. 3 1 J/, 1863.
Dear Mr Locker,
I am glad that your young lady approves of my little book. Why wouldn't you let me give it to her ? As to this canard of a Baronetcy, I remember the same foolish rumour arising some years ago, and with some little trouble I put it down, or it died down of itself. In this instance the notice had been out in the AthefUBum several days before I heard of it, but I
1868] LETTERS. 489
answered the first letter which alluded to it, by declaring that the rumour was wholly unfounded ; so that, as no Baronetcy has been offered, there is less reason for con- sidering your friendly pros and cons as to acceptance or refusal ; if it had, I trust that I should have had grace and loyalty enough to think more of the Queen's feelings than my own in this matter. I mean whichever way I answered. Both myself and my wife have been some- what vexed, and annoyed, by all this chatter.
Kind regards to Lady Charlotte. I shall be glad to see you here, whenever you like to come our way. Froude promised me he would come in January, but January is breathing his last to-day.
Yours very truly,
Alfred Tennyson.
On March 6th my father sent off his " Welcome to Alexandra." He would like to have seen the pageant at the Prince of Wales' wedding, but his ticket for the Chapel only arrived on the loth, having been mis-sent.
After the arrival of the Princess of Wales in England, Lady Augusta Bruce wrote :
Windsor Castlb, March Ztii, 1863. Dear Mr Tennyson,
Last night, a few minutes after the advent of the lovely Bride, while I felt my heart still glowing from seeing the look of inexpressible brightness, confidence, and happiness, with which she alighted on the threshold of Windsor Castle and threw herself into the arms of her new family, your letter, and the beautiful lines of welcome it enclosed, were put into my hands.
I cannot convey to you the impression they made on me, or how I longed to put them into the hands of our beloved Queen, how I longed that the heart of the nation should be moved and touched by them, as mine had been, that the noble, soul-inspiring
490 "WELCOME TO ALEXANDRA/' [l863
feeling of which we have witnessed the outburst, should find
itself so expressed. The Queen's response to your words was all
that I had expected. Her Majesty desires me to thank you very
warmly, and to tell you with how much pleasure she has read the
lines \ and how much she rejoices that the sweet and charming
Princess should be thus greeted.
One looks at her with trembling hope, but every expression,
every act, word, and gesture more than justifies one's most
sanguine expectations and desires. God grant it for the sake of
the Prince, the Country, and I am tempted to feel above all, for
the sake of that sorrowing heart, which is ever more and more
being lifted up to the divine height of which you speak. Truly
the royal mourner is bearing this joy as she has borne the
sorrow, and it is a spectacle that would move a heart of stone. I
should have liked you and dear Mrs Tennyson to see the light
on Her Majesty's countenance, as she read your lines and as she
speaks of the young joyous bride, so joyous but so tender and
gentle to the widowed mother ; also when Her Majesty speaks
of the feeling manifested by her people, realizing as she does all
that is contained in it
I remain yoiu-s truly,
Augusta Bruce.
At this time my father's indignation against Russia for her treatment of Poland was boundless. He was filled with horror too at the gigantic civil war in America, although he had always looked forward anxiously to the total abolition of slavery* : but he had hoped that it might have been accomplished gradually and peacefully.
In May the Queen asked my father what she could do for him, and he said : " Nothing, Madam, but shake my two boys by the hand. It may keep them loyal in the troublous times to come." So on the 9th Her Majesty sent for us all to Osborne. We lunched with
1 "A Welcome," published by Moxon (March, 1863). ^ He would sing with enthusiasm the great chorus of the ** Battle-hjmn of the Republic " :
« Singing < Glory, Glory, HaUelajah!' His soul goes marching on...**
1863] VISIT TO OSBORNE. 49 1
Lady Augusta Bruce, and drove with her in the grounds.
After returning to the Palace we waited in the drawing-room, and the Queen came to us. All the Princesses came in by turns. Prince Leopold also.
My mother wrote :
The Queen is not like her portraits, her face is full of intelligence and is very mobile and full of S5mfipathy. A. was delighted with * the breadth and freedom of her mind.' We talked of everything in heaven and earth. Shades of pain and sadness often passed over the Queen's face.
On the nth a Queen's messenger rode over, bringing from Her Majesty Guizot's edition of Prince Albert's Speeches^ In der Stille by Karl Sudhoff, Lieder des Leides by Albert Zeller, and an Album of the Queen's, in which A. was to write something." He wrote out "All along the Valley," and the next day sent the following letter to Lady Augusta Bruce:
May 12th f 1863.
Dear Lady Augusta,
I had no time yesterday to overlook the volume which Her Majesty sent me. I did but see the inscription in the beginning by the Duchess of Kent and Goethe's " Edel sei der Mensch " in the Prince's hand- writing — a poem which has always appeared to me one of the grandest things which Goethe or any other man has written. Perhaps some time or other the Queen will allow me to look at the book again.
The little song which I inserted in it was repeated td H.M. last year by the Duke of Argyll who told me that she approved of it, and I thought it more graceful to give an unpublished than an already printed one.
Cauteretz, which I had visited with my friend before
\
492 Robertson's sermons. [laas
I was twenty, had always lived in my recollection as a sort of Paradise; when I saw it once more, it had become a rather odious watering-place, but the hills wore their old green, and the roaring stream had the same echoes as of old. Altogether I like the little piece as well as anything I have written : I hope I wrote it out correctly — for I was very much hurried — and I feel sure that in my note to yourself I somewhere or other made pure nonsense of a sentence by putting an * of ' for an * a ' or * and.'
I have read Guizot's Preface, which is just what it ought to be — compact, careful, reverential : I have also dipt slightly into the Meditations and what I have read of them I can quite approve of : their one defect to me being that I discern the German through the translation. Passages here and there which would look quite natural in the original read a little too quaintly in our English : yet I find my appreciation of these essays scarce lessened by feeling that they are a translation. They are true- hearted, tender, and solacing, and contrasting advanta- geously with our disquisitions on these subjects. Does H.M. know the sermons of Robertson of Brighton ? he died young, not very long ago. These have always appeared to me the most spiritual utterances of any minister of the church in our times.
I am glad that the Queen remembers my visit with pleasure, and refers to the conversation she held with us, not without interest.
It was very good of you to think of bringing the book : we were sorry, it could not be.
Believe me, dear Lady Augusta,
Yours very truly,
A. Tennyson.
1868] LETTER TO THE DUKE OP ARGYLL. 493
My father wrote to the Duke of Argyll :
FARRINGFORDy
May iSthf 1863.
My dear Duke,
I have delayed so long granting the " abso- lution \" that like enough by this time you may have forgotten that you desired it.
However it is granted.
Only do not, after absolution, begin sinning the sin again with a greater gusto.
Of course I am glad to have given a moment's satis- faction to our poor Queen, glad too that you give a somewhat better account of her.
I had a very pleasant two days' visit to Cliveden. I sat in your favourite seat which looks over the reach of the river, and regretted that you were not at my side. Gladstone was at C. with me. I had met him before, but had never seen him so nearly. Very pleasant, and very interesting he was, even when he discoursed on Homer, where most people think him a little hobby- horsical : let him be. His hobby-horse is of the intellect and with a grace.
Yours ever, A. Tennyson.
In the summer we went on a tour to York, Harro- gate, Ripon and Fountains Abbey : my father was busy with his translation of Homer, and with his Alcaics to Milton.
O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time and Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages.
^ Because the Duke had repeated to the Queen ^ All along the Valley.**
494 EXPERIMENTS IN CLASSICAL METRE. [l863
After the different experiments in Classical metre had been published in the Comhill for December, my uncle Frederick wrote as follows :
I got a letter from Fitzgerald yesterday, in reply to a note from me communicating to him poor Thackeray's sudden death, which I thought it very possible he might never have learnt in his solitude and indi£Ference to newspapers. He tells me he has been ill with his old complaint, blood to the head, and expects to be taken off by it in the end ; he hopes it may be suddenly, that he may not linger after an attack in a paralysed state. But there is " a Providence that shapes our ends^^ and whatever those ends may be, whether apoplexy, paralysis, or the painless separation of the man from his integuments, or natural death, not a very different thing from putting off your clothes to go to bed, no doubt (tho' poor Fitz cannot see a hand's breadth before him in these matters) all is for the best I read Alfred's experiments in Classical metres in the Comhill^ and think them clever, though I prefer the translation from Homer. I send him an Italian sonnet which I am rather proud of, though Petrarch would stand aghast at it, and Dante would tell me to mmd my own busmess.
At Christmas, Mr Jowett, Mr W. G. Clark (Public Orator at Cambridge), Dr and Mrs Butler, and the Bradleys visited us. The flow of my father's jests and stories, when he had sympathetic listeners, was inexhaust- ible : and this party was particularly sympathetic.
One evening they were talking of repartee, and my father said, laughing: "I would give all my poems to have made the two following retorts courteous, (i) A certain French king, seeing at Court a man said to be very like him, blurted out, * You are very like our family: is it possible that your mother was much at Court } ' * No ! sire,' said the man, * but my father was.' (2) The Prince Regent, being in Portsmouth one day and seeing Jack Towers across the street, shouted out in his royal way, * Hulloa, Towers, I hear you are the greatest blackguard
1863] PERFECT REPARTEES, 495
in Portsmouth ! ' Towers replied with a low bow, * I hope your Royal Highness has not come here to take away my character ! ' "
He also thought that two of the neatest repartees were (i) the reply of Margaret More to a Lady Manners, both having had honours conferred on their families. To the satirical remark of Lady Manners "Honores mutant Mores," Margaret More replied: " That goes better in English, Madam, — * Honours change Manners.' " (2) The reply of the Italian lady to Napoleon who said to her, "Tutti Italiani sono perfidi." " Non tutti, ma Buona parte."
At the end of December my father was finishing " Aylmer's Field." He said " The story is incalculably difficult to tell, the dry facts are so prosaic in themselves." He often pointed out how hard he had found such and such a passage, how much work and thought it had cost him ; for instance, the lawyer at work in chambers ; the pompous old Aylmer in his wrath; the suicide. He liked his own descriptions of English landscape, and of cottages covered with creepers; and especially the passage about the Traveller's Joy.
The following letter was written by my father to a stranger who questioned him as to his belief in a hereafter.
Sir,
I have been considering your questions, but I am not a God or a disembodied spirit that I should answer them. I can only say that I sympathize with your grief, and if faith mean anything at all it is trusting to those instincts, or feelings, or whatever they may be called, which assure us of some life after this.
A. Tennyson.
496 LETTER TO SWINBURNE. [l863-
He also wrote to Mr Swinburne about "Atalanta in Calydon " :
My DEAR Sir,
Accept my congratulations on the success of your Greek play. I had some strong objections to parts of it, but these I think have been modified by a re- perusal, and at any rate I daresay you would not care to hear them ; here however is one. Is it fair for a Greek chorus to abuse the Deity something in the style of the Hebrew prophets ?
Altogether it is many a long day since I have read anything so fine ; for it is not only carefully written, but it has both strength and splendour, and shows moreover that you have a fine metrical invention which I envy you.
Yours very truly, A. Tennyson.
APPENDIX.
(P. 7.) Professor Hales' account of Louth School.
They (the masters) were not cruel-hearted men; to make ears tingle, bones ache, life generally a burden and a misery, was no extreme pleasure to them. Small specimens of humanity leaping and dancing, and wringing their hands, and shrieking as if engaged in the worship of some Baal who perchance slept, and must needs be awakened, could scarcely have been agreeable objects of contemplation ; but they knew not of any other method in which instruction might possibly be im- parted.... To shew how completely we lay at the mercy of the head- master, I perhaps ought to state that we generally sat when " up " to him upon one long form, opposite to which stood a chair, on which was seated the particular boy who was " going on." Our master adopted for himself the peripatetic, or, more strictly perhaps, the ana- or kata- patetic method ; his beat was immediately in front of the form on which we sat, so that he could get at the centre class as he paced up and down. He very frequently availed himself of his opportunities ; and with the masterly dexterity and quickness which distinguished him, often succeeded in " touching up " each one of us in the course of a single promenade. But most pitiable was the position of the poor boy on the chair on the other side of the master's line of walk. That chair was a sort of altar on which boy-sacrifices were offered. There the- youth sat, exposed on every side to the blast of blows and boxes that might descend on him at any moment, which were sure to descend upon him sooner or later in a hideous hurricane.
(P. 43.) Ghosts, {Prologue of my fathet^s paper written
for the ''Apostles:')
He who has the power of speaking of the spiritual world, speaks in a simple manner of a high matter. He speaks of life and death, and the things after death. He lifts the veil, but the form behind it is shrouded in deeper obscurity. He raises the doud, bat he darkens the
T. I. 497 32
498 APPENDIX.
prospect He unlocks with a golden key the iron-grated gates of the chamel house, he throws them wide open. And forth issue from the inmost gloom the colossal Presences of the Past, majores humano; some as they lived, seemingly pale, and faintly smiling; some as they died, still suddenly frozen by the chill of death ; and some as they were buried, with dropped eyelids, in their cerements and their winding sheets.
The Hsteners creep closer to each other, they are afraid of the drawing of their own breaths, the beating of their own hearts. The voice of him who speaks alone like a mountain stream on a still night fills up and occupies the silence. He stands as it were on a vantage ground. He becomes the minister and expounder of human sympathies. His words ^»</ the heart like the arrows of truth. Those who laughed long before, have long ago become solemn, and those who were solemn before, feel the awfiil sense of unutterable mystery. The speaker pauses:
"Wherefore," says one, "granting the intensity of the feeling, wherefore this fever and fret about a baseless vision?" "Do not assume," says another, " that any vision is baseless."
(P. 108.) Letters about Arthur Hallam (after
HIS death).
From R. J. Tennant to my father.
Nov. 26ihj 1833. My dear Alfred,
I wish I were gifted with a far sight to reach over hQls and towns even as far as Somersby and thro' the windows of the house, that I might see you, how you look when you come down to breakfaist, and after breakfast whether you sit reading, writing or musing, whether you are gloomy or cheerful ; I hope the latter ; and that you can look back upon the mournful past without that bitterness of spirit which you felt when I saw you. I would rather not allude to this ; but I wish to talk to you of what has been much in my thoughts since you were in town, and on which I have spoken to many of our friends. It appears to be a universal wish among them, that whatever writings Arthur has left should be collected and published; that there may be some memorial of him among us, which, tho' it will M very far short of what was hoped and expected of him, will yet be highly gratifying to hb friends, and as we think will not be without interest and value to many
APPENDIX. 499
Others. A great number of his poems are such as everyone win delight in, and there are several essays that will do honour to his powers of original thought and expression. It seemed the most proper way to cause this to be done if you were to intimate it to Mr Hallam as the general wish of his friends. His desire that you would suggest to him whatever you think that Arthur would have wished to be done, gives you ample opportunity to do this without being in the least obtrusive. I asked Spedding's opinion and he entirely agreed with me ; and he is one whose opinion on such a matter is of great weight. It is possible that Mr Hallam may himself intend to do this ; but even if it be so, it will probably be a great satisfaction to him to learn that this feeling and wish prevails so generally among us, and that such a wide circle of men are unanimous in seeking to pay honour to one who by his nearer friends was so deeply loved. You are not perhaps aware how widely his loss is felt ; one circumstance will show it ; many of his less intimate acquaintance have been exerting themselves to cause a tablet to be placed in Trinity Chapel to his memory: the intention failed only because he was in fact not on the foundation. I hope you will not think it ill-timed in me to recall your memory to what I fear you already dwell too much upon. To me the remembrance of Arthur is full of delight, looking back upon the days when he gave light and life to my spirit ; it is only when I need his counsels and know that I cannot any more receive them, or when I think upon you and your sorrow, that regret is mixed with bitterness. God bless you all. You are all in my thoughts night and day.
Ever your affectionate
R. J. Tennant.
From Robert Monteith to my father.
1833. My dear Alfred,
I assure you I have never been quite easy without having had some communication between us since the news of the loss sustained by you. I say you because, though it was and still is to myself one of those dreadful things which at moments one cannot bring oneself to believe, yet the sorrow of all others combined cannot be supposed equal to that of you and your family. I assure you all with whom I have spoken about it have been full of sympathy with you, and all wish, as I do, for still stricter friendship with you, if it might be
32—2
500 APPENDIX.
(which is all but impossible) that together we might help to fill up the gap. One feeling that remains with me is a longing to preserve an those friends whom I know Hallam loved and whom I learnt to love through him. He was so much a centre round which we moved that now there seems a possibility of many connections being all bat dissolved. Since HaUam's death I almost feel like an old man looking back on many friendships as something bygone. I beseech you, do not let us permit this, you may even disUke the interference of common friendship for a time, but you will be glad at length to gather together all the different means by which you may feel not entirely in a different world from that in which you knew and loved HallanL I will write you a long letter some day which I daresay will trouble you : if it does I shall be sorry, but it will rather prove the propriety of our not leaving you alone. I wish you were abroad with us and am revolving some schemes for seeing the south together. All Mr Garden's £sunily desire to be most kindly remembered to you.
Believe me your very sincere friend,
R. MoMTErrH.
(P. 117.) Mariana in the South. Arthur H. Hallam to W. B. Donne\
TRDnrv,
Sunday. [183 1.] My dear Donne,
I rejoice exceedingly at the admiration you express for Alfred Tennyson in general, and the Indian ditty' in particular.
I expect you to be properly grateful to me for sending you by these presents another poem, of which to say that I love it would be only saying that it is his. It is intended, you will perceive, as a kind of pendant to his former poem of '' Mariana," the idea of both being the expression of desolate loneliness, but with this distinctive variety in the second, that it paints the forlorn feeling as it would exist under the influence of different impressions of sense. When we were journeying together this summer through the South of France we came upon a range of country just corresponding to his preconceived thought of ft barrenness, so as in the South, and the portraiture of the scenery in this poem is most faithful. You will, I think, agree with me that the
^ Afterwards "Examiner of plays." This hitherto unpublished letter has beet kindly given to me by his son Mr Mowbray Donne. * " Anacaona," p. 56.
APPENDIX. 501
essential and distinguishing character of the conception requires in the " Southern Mariana " a greater lingering on the outward circumstanceSi and a less palpable transition of the poet into Mariana's feelings, than was the case in the former poem. Were this not implied in the subject it would be a &ult : " an artist/' as Alfred is wont to say, " ought to be lord of the five senses/' but if he lacks the inward sense which reveals to him what is inward in the heart, he has left out the part of Hamlet in the play. In this meaning I think the objection sometimes made to a poem, that it is too picturesque, is a just objection ; but according to a more strict use of words, poetry cannot be too pictorial, for it cannot represent too truly, and when the object of the poetic power happens to be an object of sensuous perception it is the business of the poetic language to paint.
It is observable in the mighty models of art, left for the worship of ages by the Greeks and those too rare specimens of Roman production which breathe a Greek spirit, that their way of imaging a mood of the human heart in a group of circumstances, each of which reciprocally affects and is affected by the unity of that mood, resembles much Alfred's manner of delineation, and should therefore give additional sanction to the confidence of our praise.
I believe you will find instances in all the Greek poems of the highest order, — at present I can only call into distinct recollection the divine passage about the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Lucretius and the desolation of Ariadne in Catullus, and the fragments of Sappho, in which I see much congeniality to Alfred's peculiar power. I beg pardon for this prose, here comes something better.
(Here the "Southern Mariana " is copied at length.)
Your very sincere friend,
A. H. Hallam.
(P. 207.) The Reception of the Early Poems, by
Aubrey de Vere.
1832-1845.
There are moments when the day on which I first made acquain- tance with Alfred Tennyson's poetry seems to me less remote than those days upon which events comparatively recent took place. It is more clearly marked in my memory than the day on which I first met the poet himself. My acquaintance with him as a poet had been so long and familiar, that to have made acquaintance with him as a man would have been to me something remarkable only if the man
502 APPENDIX.
and the poet had been in striking contrast. On the contrary they were very like each other.
The mode in which I first made acquaintance with Alfred Ten- nyson's poetry is recorded in a letter which was written by me after the death of the late Lord Houghton and published in his recent biography by Mr Wemyss Reid. Lord Houghton, then Richard Monckton Mibies, a Cambridge friend of my eldest brother's, drove up to the door of our house at Curragh Chase one night in 1832, and in a few days had quite won our hearts by his pleasant ways, his wit, and his astonishing acquaintance with all the modem European Literatures. He had brought with him the first number of a new magazine entitled The Englishman containing Arthur Hallam's essay on Tennyson's Poems ^ chiefly Lyrical, The day on which I first took the slender volume into my hands was with me a memorable one. Arthur Hallam's essay had contrasted two different schools of modem poetry, calling one of these classes Poets of Reflection, and the other class Poets of Sensation, the latter represented by Shelley and Keats. Of Keats I knew nothing, and of Shelley very little ; but the new poet seemed to me, while he had about him a touch of both the classes thus characterized, to have yet little in common with either. He was emi- nently original, and about that originality there was for me a wild, inexplicable magic and a deep pathos, though hardly as simple as Wordsworth's pathos, and with nothing of its homeliness; and the character of its language was nearly the opposite of that which Words- worth had, at least in his youth, asserted to be the true poetic diction, viz. the language of common life among the educated. The diction of the new poet was elaborate in accordance with a certain artificiality belonging to the time, that is, whenever strange combinations of words were needed in order to produce a corresponding exactitude of sig- nificance. The youthful poet very soon afterwards discarded that elaborateness, perceiving that the loss of simplicity caused by it could not be compensated for by any degree of expressiveness, and adopted a style especially marked by its purity. But the subtle exquisiteness of his imagination remained unchanged and had never required any such artificial aid. It had ever '' fed among the lilies " of a '' Fairy Land," which to it had ever been a native land. With the bleating of the lamb or the lowing of the herd there mingled from afiar ^ the horns of Elfiand faiintly blowing." I remember my dear friend, Saia Coleridge, daughter of the poet, once remarking to me that, however inferior the bulk of a young man's poetry may be to that of the poet when mature, it generally possesses some passages with a special freshness of their own, and an inexplicable charm to be found in them alone. Such was the charm with which many of those early poems
\PPENDIX. 5^3
captivated me, a charm which they have never lost. Still, as in that old time, the old oak-tree, "thick-leaved, ambrosial," sighs over the grave of ''Claribel." The new interpretation of Nature given to me then remains, and the beauty mingled with the pathos, when the scene described is one of Nature's forlomest, as in '^The Dying Swan," or in the weird lines
Low-flowing breezes are roaming
The broad valley dimm'd in the gloaming —
never cease to possess me as they did the day that I read them first The sea beside which the minstrel lover chanted the ballad of "Oriana" seemed to me to uplift a clamour of woe such as no sea had ever uttered before, and reminded me of the " sad prophet's " cry, " Magnum sicut mare lamentatio mea." Another image of grief, if in a form less terrible, yet more drearily desolate, was presented to me by " Mariana in the Moated Grange," with the blackened pool close by, and the poplar that "shook alway" above it. The "Recollections of the Arabian Nights " seemed all the more wonderful because the picture presented with such truthfulness was one taken less from Nature's page than that of art, because its very excess of magnificence precluded that effect of tawdriness which commonly characterizes descriptions of Oriental splendours; and also because the harmony of the poem's metre so fully sustained the brilliancy of its imagery. It was
it
A world of bright vision set floating in sound ^."
Many of the other poems impressed me not less vividly, and I re- member most of them by heart stiU. Day after day my sister and I used to read them as we drove up and down the " close green ways" of our woods. Our pony soon detected our abstracted mood. Several times he nearly upset us down a bank ; and often choosing his path according to his private judgment, stood still with his head hanging over a gate. We sometimes sketched an imaginary likeness of the un- known poet. We determined that he must be singularly unlike Shelley ; that his step must not be rapid but vague, that there would be on his face less of light, but more of dream ; that his eye would be that of one who saw little where the many see much, and saw much where the many see little. Wholly unlike the young poet we thought must be the countenance of him who had long been the chief object of our poetic veneration, the great contemplative Bard who had forsaken " the fortunate Isles of the Muses" for his "Tower of Speculation on the mountain top," Coleridge.
^ Leigh Hunt.
504 APPENDIX.
In two years more Alfred Tennyson met us again in the gift of a new volume : it had been eagerly waited for and it was eagerly read. The second volume was in several particulars a decided advance upon the earlier ; yet we enjoyed it less at first. Though its subjects were more important and were also treated with more skill, a something seemed to be wanting. That something was probably the spontaneity and unconsciousness which belongs to very youthful poetry in its most feUcitous specimens ; for its failures are more numerous than its successes. A third and maturer period comes, in which the best qualities that mark the first and the second period are found united. A few poems in the later volume touched us nearly in the same way as those in the earlier. One of these was "The Lady of Shalott," destined to reappear at the interval of many years in a nobler, ampler and richer form, but not one which challenged more vividly the youth- ful imagination. Another was " Margaret," to which might be added " The Death of the Old Year," and " The Miller's Daughter " ; but most of them were remoter themes, characteristic of memorable epochs, or involving some metaphysical problems. Those poems were written with very great power and skill : they were unlike each other ; they showed that the author's genius possessed an extraordinary versatility, and that besides what was most characteristic in that genius he pos- sessed an exquisite taste and a high art. " Mariana in the South " breathes the air of Southern France; and its sadness is touched by an amenity which never mitigates the wintry dreariness of "Mariana in the Moated Grange." "CEnone" is thoroughly Greek in spirit, though far richer in detail than the Greek art, a severe thing, as this commonly is. " The May Queen " is an enchanting Idyl of English Rural Life, not rendered dull by its moral but ennobled by it. The " Dream of Fair Women " does not illustrate any particular country or period ; but it is a marvellous specimen of one especial class of poetry, that of Vision, which reached its perfection in Dante, whose verse the young aspirant may have been reading with a grateful desire to note by this poem the spot on which his feet had rested for a time. There is however nothing of plagiarism in it. "The Lotos-Eaters" is not more admirable for its beauty than for its unity; everywhere the luxuriously lovely scenery corresponds with the voluptuous sentiment ; though voluptuous only in the way of enervate thought, not of passion. I remember the poet's pointing out to me the improvement effected later by the introduction of the last paragraph setting forth the Lu- cretian Philosophy respecting the Gods, their aloofness from all human interests and elevated action, an Epicurean and therefore hard-hearted repose, sweetened not troubled by the endless wail from the earth. The sudden change of metre in the last paragraph has a highly artistic
APPENDIX. 505
effect, that of throwing the bulk of the poem as it were into a remote distance. This poem should be contrasted with another and later one, "Ulysses/' which illustrates the same lesson in a converse form. It shows us what Heroism may be even in old age, though sustained by little except the love of knowledge, and the scorn of sloth. Carlyle said that it was " Ulysses " which first convinced him that " Tennyson was a true poet." I remember hearing that Bishop Thirlwall made the same statement respecting " St Simeon Stylites." /
Another poem in the second volume, which, if it has not the SI^n- taneousness of many in the first, at least illustrates a great theme with a great and manifold mastery, is " The Palace of Art." In its extreme subjectivity it reminds us of German genius; but though its scope is a philosophical and spiritual one, its handling is as strikingly objective ; and it consists almost wholly of images which though sub- ordinated to moral, not material ends, yet possess a vividness and a concentrated power rarely found elsewhere, and reminds us of Matthew Arnold's assertion that German Literature, however profound it may be in thought, is cumbrous and clumsy in style compared with English. Its theme is the danger resulting firom that " Art Heresy " of modem times, which substitutes the worship of Art for its own sake in place of that reverence which man should feel for it, only when it knows its place, and is content to minister at the altars of Powers greater than itself, viz. Nature and Religion. In this poem nearly every stanza is a picture condensed within four lines. It describes a Palace not a Temple, one created by the imagination exclusively for its own delight, an imagination so great that it refiises all human sympathy, ** O God-like isolation which art mine," and yet so small that it can dream of nothing greater than itself.
I sit as God, holding no form of Creed, But contemplating all.
The root of the evil, as the poet clearly intimates, is to be found not in the Sense, but in Pride, a greater crime, the sole expiation of which is Humility.
"Make me a cottage in the vale," she said, "Where I may mourn and pray."
This poem is far greater in thought and in power than any of those in the earlier volume, though less attractive to some, perhaps on account of an apparently didactic purpose. I remember a legend about it, whether authentic or not. Alfred Tennyson and Richard Chenevix Trench had been friends at Cambridge, and had a common love of poetry. Soon after his ordination the fiiture Archbishop paid a visit
506 APPENDIX.
to the future Laureate. He spoke about the new heresy which sub- stituted Art for Faith and Beauty for Sanctity. His brother-poet, it is said, contested nothing, but simply Ustened, occasionally replenishing his pipe. When Trench had taken his departure the auditor took up his pen, and the single thought became a poem. Later the same thought was illustrated by Trench in two poems, viz. "The Prize of Spng," one of the stateliest lyrics of modem times, and a noble repre- sentative of Hellenic Song: and, secondly, in a sonnet, beginning, "What good soever in thy heart or mind."
Two short poems of an extraordinary strength and majesty were written at this time: one would have thought that they had been written at a maturer period ; but, if I remember right, they were sug- gested by some popular demonstrations connected with the Reform Bill of 1832, and its rejection by the House of Lords. Their political teaching shows that when but twenty-three years of age Tennyson's love of Liberty, which at all periods so strongly characterized his poetry, was accompanied by an equally strong conviction that Liberty must ever be a Moral Power beginning upon the spiritual "heights" of wisdom, mutual respect and self-control; and that no despotism could be more fatal than that tyranny of a majority in which alone a material omnipotence is united with a legal one. These two poems begin respectively with the lines, " You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease," and " Of old sat Freedom on the heights." Their massive grandeur results mainly from their brevity, and the austere simplicity of their diction, which belongs to what has sometimes been called the " lapidary " style. Each might indeed have been carved upon the entablature of a temple; and I remember hearing an aged statesman exclaim that they reminded him of what he felt when, driving across the lonely plain of Paestum, he found himself confronted by its two temples. Their power consists largely in that perfection of poetic form with which each of them is invested. In this respect they may be profitably contrasted with a third poem which begins "Love thou thy land, with love far-brought." In thought and imagination that poem is equal to the former two; yet it bears no comparison with them as regards weight and effectiveness, because the same perfection of form was forbidden to it by the extent and complexity of its theme. It could not have been caused by want of pains on the part of the poet An anecdote will illustrate his solicitude on the subject of poetic form, the importance of which was perhaps not as much appreciated by any other writer since the days of Greek poetry. One night, after he had been reading aloud several of his poems, all of them short, he passed one of them to me and said, "What is the matter with that poem? " I read it and answered, " I see nothing to complain of." He
APPENDIX. §07
laid his fingers on two stanzas of it, the third and fifth, and said, " Read it again." After doing so I said, " It has now more completeness and totality about it ; but the two stanzas you cover are among its best." '' No matter," he rejoined, '' they make the poem too longbacked ; and they must go, at any sacrifice." " Every short poem," he remarked, ** should have a definite shape, like the curve, sometimes a single, sometimes a double one, assumed by a severed tress or the rind of an apple when flung on the floor."
In 1842, twelve years after the publication of Alfred Tennyson's first volume, a new edition of his poems appeared in two volumes, the earlier of which included his poems previously published, with a few exceptions, while the second was wholly new. It was this edition which carried his poetry beyond a narrower circle and fixed it in the heart of the nation : but in winning the many the poet did not cease to delight the "fit and few." They gladly recognised the progress which his art had made, a progress the result of well-directed pains, as well as of the poet's moral characteristics and peculiarities.
Genius is often frittered away by the social popularity which greets its earlier achievements, one among the worst forms of adulation. Henry Taylor amusingly describes his own immunity from such perils. He was, he tells us,
"From social snares with ease Saved by that gracious gift, inaptitude to please."
The younger poet was as little open to such snares. He was proof against them through the absence of vanity, even more than through shyness, indolence, or any other peculiarity. He was bom a poet ; and had no ambition except the single one of first meriting and then receiving the poet's crown, an ambition the unselfish character of which is so asserted by Shelley in the expression "Fame is Love disguised." No matter how much courted he might be, no attraction, whether of wit, beauty or fashion, could prevail on him to frequent any society except that of those whom he cordially liked ; and in none did he ever talk for effect. Neither did he allow himself, as so many of our best modem poets have done, to be diverted from poetry by inferior forms of labour; though the loss very frequently sustained by poetry is doubtless much compensated by the signal aptitude which the poetic faculty sometimes shows for tasks not properly its own, whether literary or practical. He delighted in all forms of knowledge, but he was faithful to his own gift, and drew all things beside into the service of poetry, as their Suzerain. For this task the largeness of his sympathies specially qualified him, though it might have produced
508 APPENDIX.
the opposite effect if he had not possessed a great unity of purpose as well as a great imaginative versatility.
Another gift contributed to make these twelve years fruitful to him, that of a singular common sense. This gift, often regarded as but an humble one, is in reality nothing less than a form of inspiration, for, like the loftier inspiration, it works it knows not how, and spon- taneously. It is often, as obviously in the case of Shakespeare, united with the highest genius ; and it is as often signally defective in men of high abilities, but men who in genius have no part. The gift of common sense united with that of imagination attracted Alfred Ten- nyson to the humorous side of things as well as to the pathetic, and thus made him learned in Life, the Life of the Humanities. All those things in them which others see but in their accidents, the mind thus dowered with a twofold inspiration sees in their essence.
Those English Idyls ^ were a gift such as no other writer of Idyls had ever given to his countrymen. No Englishman can read them in far lands without the memory coming back to him of the days when he sat on an English stile, and watched English lambs at play, or walked beneath hedgerow trees in '* a land of ancient peace " Hstening to the last note of the last bird-song as the twilight deepened into night. He will see an English Ruth adorning with flowers the hat of the child that is not hers, in the hope of winning his grandfather's heart, or sitting on the poppied ground amid the wheat, while
The reapers reap'd And the sun fell and all the land was dark.
He will see " The Gardener's Daughter," and her garden described, to quote Henry Taylor's words, "as only Tennyson could describe it," that Garden bordered by
A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream That stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar, Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on. Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge Crown'd with the minster towers.
It would be hard to find two Idyls more perfect than "Dora" and "The Gardener's Daughter," or more unlike each other — the former so Hebraic in its stem and unadorned simplicity; the latter so pure in its richness, sweetness and pathos, a pathos not of sorrow, but of joy, one that delights, not wounds. I remember an incident connected with "The Gardener's Daughter." The poet had corrected
^ My father used to spell Idyls then with one " /" for these shorter Idyls, and Idylls with two "/'s" for the epic •* Idylls of the King."
APPENDIX. 509
it as carefully as he had originally composed it in his head, where he was in the habit of keeping more than one poem at a time before he wrote down any of them. I found him one day in James Spedding's rooms. He shewed me the MS and said, "The corrections jostled each other, and the poem seemed out of gear. Spedding has just now remarked that it wants nothing but that this passage, forty lines, should be omitted. He is right." It was omitted.
Few of these Idyls are more perfect than "Audley Court," short as it is. What can be more vigorous than these lines illustrative of simple aversion, as distinguished from hatred or resentment?
Oh ! who would love ? I woo*d a woman once. But she was sharper than an eastern wind, And all my heart turned from her, as a thorn Turns from 0u sea; but let me live my life.
Those descriptions of nature owe half their charm to the cir- cumstance that the illustrations of men and manners are in entire harmony with them. In them material nature and human life are mirrors that mutually reflect each other. There exist pictures in which the landscape is by one artist and the figures by another. Compared with these poems they are failures.
Among the Idyls none are more delightful than those which illustrate the life of young Englishmen and Englishwomen. Such are " Edwin Morris," " Locksley Hall," " The Day-Dream," and " Will Waterproofs Lyrical Monologue." To me the most delightful of these is "The Talking Oak." It is more difficult to make the Manor House poetical than the Cottage ; but here as in " The Princess " and elsewhere that arduous problem is solved. In it the poet's gift of expressive, har- monious and richly coloured language reaches its highest :
O rock upon thy towery top
All throats that gurgle sweet ! All starry culmination drop
Balm-dews to bathe thy feet !
All grass of silky feather grow —
And while he sinks or swells The full south-breeze around thee blow
The sound of minster bells.
Very remarkable is the skill with which " The Talking Oak," while depicting the country life of England, connects with it a series of sketches illustrating, each in but a few happy touches, many of her past historical periods. Its author told me that this poem was an experiment meant to test the degree in which U. \& 'fr^JwcoL ^^ -^^cs^^^.
5IO APPENDIX.
of poetry to humanise external nature. The subtiety of his own sym- pathies with Nature probably rendered it easier for him than for any other poet to invest tree or stream with human affections and sjrm- pathies. He mentioned that he had written, as a companion to this poem, another one, dealing in similar &shion with a rivolety but that it was lost: and he repeated a line the syllables of which imitated the sound of a stream running over a stony bed^ " I babble with my pebbles." The lost poem seems to survive in "The Brook," the most artistic, I think, of that kind of IdyL To this Idyl series many were added in later volumes, such as "The First Quarrel," "The Sisters," "The Village Wife," "The Spinster's Sweet-'arts," "The Children's Hospital," and "Rizpah," among the strongest of the series.
In this series Idylic Poetry was nused to a height after which it had never before aspired. In most of the old Idyls, and the modem imitations of them, a couple of shepherds piped their loves in rivalry. One of them gained his prize, and thanked Faunus; another lost it, as he had already lost the treacherous object of his affections, and went home seriously distressed but not without hope of " better luck the next time." There was in them no attempt at descriptive poetry : the trees and the pastures were generally as like each other as sheep is like sheep. It was otherwise with these new Idyls. In them there was room for the whole range of human affections, passions and interests; and their descriptive passages delineated nature in all her moods and aspects, the humblest as well as the greatest. Had those poems included nothing but their descriptive portions they would hence still have possessed a great charm : but they were yet more remarkable for the dramatic skill with which the characters were discriminated, whether they belonged to the cultured or the humbler classes of society. How unlike are the self-satisfied and harmless babbler of "Philip's Farm," and the sturdy yeoman who starves his son because he will not marry Dora, and who later weeps over that son's orphan child! How different from both is that Northern &rmer of " the old style," with a heart hard as a stone, and a mind that seems but animated matter, and yet with a single spot of tenderness in him, one for the soil itself, from which he seems to have risen full-grown, on which he has laboured so long, and over which he cannot bear that the new-fangled steam-plough and the hiss of the "kettle" should ever pass ! Many a year before Tennyson wrote drama, his Idyls had proved that in his poetic gift there lived a latent but admirable dramatic insight.
The volume of 1842 was welcomed not only with gratitude for all that it bestowed, but as an augury of gifts greater yet sure to follow
APPENDIX. 5 1 1
whenever a genius so potent and so various measured itself with a theme worthy of it, and capable of testing all its powers. That augury was fulfilled by the publication of ''In Memoriam" and the "Idylls of the King." "In Memoriam" showed how great a thing man's love is, by revealing the greatness of that love, that grief and that deliverance from grief, of which it is capable. The "Idylls of the King," more of a complete great Epic than any of the great Epics, showed how high is that aim which every commonwealth of men is bound to propose to itself; and it showed not less that that high aim, political at once and spiritual, when frustrated, owes its doom not to mischance, or external violence chiefly, but to moral evil that saps the State's foundations.
(P. 487.) Reminiscences by Thohas Wilson and
William Allingham.
1863-64. Mr Wilson writes :
We used frequently to walk together with the boys, sometimes drawing Mrs Tennyson in her little four-wheeled carriage along the Downs, towards the Needles, through Maiden's Croft over the little rustic bridge across the lane, where sometimes inquisitive strangers used to lie in wait to catch a sight of the Poet
Maiden's Croft reminds me of Mr Tennyson's resentment of Mr Ruskin's criticising his line in " Maud " as a " pathetic fidlacy " :
And left the daisies rosy.
"Why," he said, " the very day I wrote it, I saw the daisies rosy in Maiden's Croft, and thought of enclosing one to Ruskin labelled 'A pathetic fallacy.' " I remember asking him if unselfishness was the essence of virtue? his reply was " Certainly."
Not unfrequently I used to have evening talks with him on the way up to bed, looking at the many pictures that adorned the staircase : these he said he looked at far more frequently than pictures in the room. On one of these occasions, as he was holding a candle to examine some book or picture (for he was very near-sighted), his wavy dark hair took fire ; I was for putting it out : " Oh, never mind," he said, " it depends upon chance burnings."
He spoke of " the wind torturing the roof," and used often to mount outside the roof from his attic-chamber, to admire the moonlight, and
5 1 2 APPENDIX.
the sound of the breakers in the Bay. He was so short-sighted that the moon, without a glass, seemed to him like a shield across the sky ^.
He came into my room one day looking for any new book to feed upon : he took down one by Stevenson called Praying and JVorking, an account of German Ragged Schools ; he told me afterwards he had read it with great pleasure ; he was keen to get De Morgan's Prom Matter to Spirit,
On Lionel's birthday we acted a little Play or Charade: the first scene, to represent the word ' lion,' was the interlude of Pyramus and Thbbe from Midsummer Nights Dream ; the servants were admitted to the performance, and laughed heartily at Wall, the Moon, and other grotesque characters. Tennyson remarked that this confirmed his opinion of the enduring popularity of broad Comedy in England.
Tennyson always said that his childhood had been at times very unhappy ; and his desire was to make Hallam and Lionel's childhood as happy as possible : he encouraged Lionel, who had some talent for drawing, to copy natural objects.
He used sometimes to read aloud in the evening, in a deep sus- tained sonorous voice. I remember little Hallam warning me not to trouble him when he was smoking his first morning pipe, when he used to think that his best inspirations came.
At the time of these Recollections I was not in good health, some- times suffering from fits of melancholy ; on one such occasion he said, " If you wish to kill yourself don't do it here : go to Yarmouth and do it decently"; on another occasion he said, ''Just go grimly on." I once spoke of Christ as an example of failure. ** Do you," said he, " call that failure which has altered the belief and the social relations of the whole world ? "
Mr Allingham writes :
Oct. ird^ 1863. Saturday. We drove to Farringford (Mrs A., Clough and W. A.), picking up on the way Pollock and his son. Drawing-room tea, Mrs Tennjrson in white, I can sometimes scarcely hear her low tones. Mrs Cameron, dark, short, sharp-eyed, one hears very distinctly. I wandered to the book-table where Tenn3rson jomed me. He praised Worsley's Odyssey. In a book of Latin versions fit)m his own poetry he found some slips in Lord Lyttelton's Latin CyUurea Venus ^ etc. "Did I find Lymington very dull?" I told him that
^ He said that he never taw the two end ftan in the tail of *'UiMi Mijor'
separate. To bis eyes they intersected one another.
APPENDIX. 513
since coming there I had heard Cardinal Wiseman lecture (on Self- culture), Spurgeon preach, and seen Tom Sayers spar. ^More than I have," he remarked. In taking leave he said, '* Come to-morrow."
Oct, 4M. I walked over alone to Farringford, found first Mrs Tennyson, the two boys and their tutor. Tennyson at luncheon. '' What do we know of the feelings of insects? Nothing." Tennyson takes me upstairs to his '' den " on the top storey, and higher, up a ladder, to the leads. He often comes up here at night to look at the heavens....Then we went down and walked about the grounds, looking at a cedar, a huge fern, an Irish yew. The dark cedar in ''Maud," '' sighing for Lebanon," he got at Swainston, Sir John Simeon's.. ..We went down the garden, past a large fig-tree growing in the open, '' like a breaking wave." Contradictions /ri?m Aim are no way disagreeable : and so to the fiu-myard. " Have you a particular feeling about a farm- yard ? " he asked, " a special delight in it ? I have. The fiist time I read Shakespeare was on a hay-stack, Othello, I said, 'This man's overrated.' Boys can't understand Shakespeare." We spoke a little of the Shakespeare " Tercentenary," next year. " Most people pronounce 'Arbutus ' wrong, with the second syllable long. ' Clematis ' too, which should be ' Cle-m&tis.'" In the passage, or somewhere near it, I noticed a dusty phial hanging up with some dried brown stuff in it (left by the last owners of Farringford). "It is a Lar," he said, with a twinkle in his eyes. " And what else is it ? " I asked. " An old bottle of Ipecacuanha." We looked at the great magnolia stretching up to the roof; then into the hall and saw some fossils. " Man is so small ! " he said, " but a fly on the wheel." Mis Clough was in the house, and she and I now departed, Tennyson coming with us as far as the little south postern opening on the lane....In parting he said to me, "We shall see you sometimes?" which gladdened me.
Later. We (W. A. and Rev. W. Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet)' drove in a fly to Farringford, where Tennyson, Mrs Tenn3rson, Miss Tennyson, met us in the hall. Tennyson and Barnes at once on easy terms, having simple poetic minds and mutual good-will Talk of "Ancient Britons, barrows, roads," etc. I to upper room to dress, Tennyson comes in to me, and we go down together. Dinner : stories of Ghosts and Dreams. To drawing-room as usual, where Tennyson had his port Barnes no wine. Tennyson said, "Modem fame is nothing : I'd rather have an acre of land. I shall go down, down ! I'm up now. Action and reaction." Tennyson went upstairs by him- self. Tea. Enter Mrs Cameron (in a funny red open-work shawl) with two of her boys. Tennyson reappeared, and Mrs Cameron showed a small firework toy called " Pharaoh's Serpents," a kind of pastille which when lighted twists about in a wormlike shape. Mrs Cameron said
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514 APPENDIX.
thqr were poisonous, and forbade as all to touch. Tennyson in defiance pat out his hand. '' Don't touch 'em," shrieked Mrs Cameron. << You shan't, Alfred ! " But Alfred did. <' Wash your hands then ! " Bot Alfred wouldn't, and rubbed his moustache instead, enjoying Mrs Cameron's agonies. Then she said to him, " Will you come to-morrow to be photographed?" He, very emphatically, '^No!" Then she turned to me, ** You left a Great Poet out of N^tif^ak VaUey^ and have been repenting ever since in sackcloth and ashes, eh?" She meant Henry Taylor. I tried to say that the volume was not a collection of specimens of poets, but she did not listen. Then she said graciously, '' Come to-morrow and you shall be taken, and (whispers) you shall see Madonna, eh?" Madonna, otherwise called Island Mary, being one of her pretty servants whom she photographs as the Virgin, etc. This eh ! and hm ! makes a droll litde finish to many of Mis Cameron's sentences. She is extremely clever, and good-natured. Tennyson and I went out to the porch with Mrs Cameron, where her donkey-chair was waiting in the nK>onlight. We looked at some of her own photographs on the walls, and at one of Henry Taylor. Tennyson said to one of the Cameron boys, ''All jrour mother's geese are swans and all her Taylors are gods!" ''What's that?" says Mrs Cameron, who only heard part; upon which Tennyson repeated the words, introducing them with "Your son says," at which we all laughed, whether the lady enjoyed it or not. But she was candid enough on her part. Tennyson asked her would she photograph Mr Barnes? But she said " No." She objected to the top of his head.
Tennyson now took Barnes and me to his top room. " Darwinism, Man from Ape, would that really make any difference?" "Time is nothing (said T.) : are we not all part of Deity? " " Pantheism," hinted Barnes, who was not at ease in this sort of speculation. " Well,'* says Tennyson, " I think I believe in Pantheism, of a sort." Barnes to bed, Tennyson and I up ladder to the roof and looked at Orion ; then to my room, where more talk. He liked Barnes, he said, "bat he is not accustomed to strong views theologic." We talked of Browning, for whom Tennyson had a very strong personal regard. " I can't under- stand how he should care for my poetry. His new poem has 15,000 lines : there's copiousness ! Good night" Bed about x.
APPENDIX. 5 1 5
(P. 487.) Hints for ^* Enoch Arden'' from Edward Fitegerald
(1862), in a letter to my mother
How is it that your note has been unanswered this month or more? Why, a fortnight of the month I didn't see it at all : being away with a sister in Norfolk; and the remaining fortnight? Why I kept thinking I might tell you something about the fishing questions you ask me : I mean, about telling you ** anyMng^^ about fishermen, etc. Well, some- how, what little I know on such matters won't turn up on demand : perhaps it would undemanded if you and A. T. were in my boat one summer day on this poor river, or plunging over its bar into the German Seas. Ah ! Alfred should never have left his old county with its Mablethorpe sea. As to the definite questions you ask on the subject, I can only answer for the customs in such matters hereabout,
1. There is no apprenticeship to fishing: anyone takes anyone who comes handy, etc., even in the Deep-Sea fishing, i.e. not along the coast, but out to the Dogger bank, Scotland, Ireland, etc. (for cod-fish) ; anyone may go who can get a berth. Only a little while ago, a lad was telling me at Aldbro' how he first went, as a boy of 13 : he hid himself in the stem of the boat that was pushing off to the smack : and when they were well off shore, he pushed up his head from under ropes, etc., and the " Master " only said, "What ! is thee that devil of a boy ? You'll be glad enough to be at home again before along ! " and so took him out to sea ; and now the lad has his i4r. a week (grown to 19 years old) like the rest.
2. " May fishermen act as pilots, or must they be of a Guild of pilots? " YeSy properly : no one is authorized to become a pilot, unless he has served his time as mate in a square-rigged vessel (i.e. nothing under a brig: even a schooner won't do). When he has so served a certain time, he has to pass examinations before (I think) the Trinity Board and so is admitted or not to be of the Guild. But, when all the authorized pilots in a place are exhausted (as will happen when many foreign ships pass, etc.), then 2i fisherman or other i^/iauthorized sailor will go : being called a ^^ Brummagem Pilot^^
Oh dear ! this is very learned, very useless, I dare say. But you ask
me and I tell my best. I have been almost tempted to write you out
some morsels of Dampier's Voyages which I copied out for myself: so
fine as they are in their way I think, but they would be no use unless
A. T. fell upon them by chance : for, of all horses, Pegasus least likes
to be dragged to drink. I love Captain Cook too : what fine English
his, in the Johnsonian days ! I remember, 10 years ago, telling Alfred
at Brighton of some poor little verses found in the Prayer-Book of a
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5 1 6 APPENDIX.
seafaring son of oar old coachman, who died at sea : and Alfined took the pipe out of his blessed old lips to remnmiar one, which Tkmftermj pooh-poohed. Along the coast here are many peculiar and fine ScaiKfi- navian words, which are not registered even by our provincial gi*^— fjfn (who have dealt chiefly with the inland husbandman people).
Well, I shan't go on more about this unless you desire some move. About the photographs of A. T., thank you for them : 9%ypm think one of them very good, I have no doubt it is so : but what beccnnes of die eyes? I had seen some bigger ones, which made a sort oi Rembrandt Burgomaster of him: but in reality I don't much love phoCogxafihi : though I asked you for one, because I knew they were always going on : and I sincerely thank jrou for sending me (I dare say) the besL
This is vile weak scribbling, after two glasses of b-r-n-d-y and water too (Sunday evening).
I saw (in Norfolk) that Yarrell does give that human note to the plover: so I dare say he is right, and my friends on the river here wrong. I see too that Yarrell writes the word "Curlew" as Fkendi ^^Couvre iieu^* {I think) ^ supposed to be firom its cry. (Query. WBI A. T. say anything better than an Aldbro' fisherman said of a boat — (Humph) " Ah ! — She go Uke a WiaUn, she do ! ")
Some Summer — some Summer day send the old wretch here, where nobody scarce knows his name (don't be angry, Mrs A. T.), tiioog^ a duller place is not ! but an ugly river
(and a dirty sea) (and E. F. G.)
which is my poem Q. £. D.
(P.S. Leave the scrap of Cook on the floor, in Alfred's way : doni give it him.)
*•