TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS

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Barraud, photographer  Emery Walker, Ph.sc.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(in his 80^th year)

TENNYSON AND HIS
FRIENDS

EDITED
BY
HALLAM, LORD TENNYSON

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1911

Dedicated
TO
THE FRIENDS OF TENNYSON
BY
HIS SON

[Pg vii]

[Pg ix]

[Pg xii]

[Pg xiii]

[Pg 1]

TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS

[Pg 2]

(Dedication of “The Death of Œnone” to Emily, Lady Tennyson)

Emery Walker, Ph.sc.

Emily Lady Tennyson
from a drawing by G. F. Watts, R.A.

[Pg 3]

By Emily, Lady Tennyson

Written for her son in 1896

You ask me to tell you something of my life before marriage at Horncastle in Lincolnshire. It would be hard indeed not to do anything you ask of me if within my power. To say the truth, this particular thing you want is somewhat painful. The first thing I remember of my father[1] is his looking at me with sad eyes after my mother’s[2] death. Her I recollect, passing the window in a velvet pelisse, and then in a white shawl on the sofa, and then crowned with roses—beautiful in death. I recollect, too, being carried to her funeral; but I asked what they were doing, and in all this had no idea of death.

My life before marriage was in many ways sad: in one, however, unspeakably happy. No one could have had a better father, or been happier with her two sisters, Anne and Louisa. Although, if we were too merry and noisy in the mornings, we were summoned by my Aunt Betsy (who lived with us) all three into her room, to hold out our small hands for stripes from a certain little riding-whip; or if, later in the day, our needlework was not well done we had our fingers pricked with a needle, or if the lessons were not finished, we had fools’ caps put on our heads, and were banished to a corner of the room. My aunt’s nature was by no means cruel; she was, on the whole, kind and dutiful to us, yet no[Pg 4] doubt with effort on her part, for she had no instinctive love of children.

Among our neighbours we had as friends the Tennysons, the Rawnsleys, the Bellinghams, and the Massingberds. The death of my cousin, Mr. Cracroft, was among my early tragedies. He had been on public business at Lincoln: and on his return to Horncastle, was seized at our house with Asiatic cholera, a solitary case, which proved fatal. Ourselves and his daughters heard of it in a strange way. We were in a tent at a sheep-shearing, the great rustic festival of that day. A village boy came into our tent, and swarmed up the pole, saying to us, “I know something; your father is dead.” We hurried home, and we, three sisters, were put by my aunt (to keep us quiet) to the hitherto-unwonted task of stoning raisins. This made me so indignant that I threw my raisins over the edge of the bowl, and forthwith my aunt caught me up, and—so rough was the treatment of children then—banged my head against the door of our old wainscoted rooms, until I called out for my father, crying aloud, “Murder”; when he rushed in and saved me.

My next memory of my father is his giving me Latin lessons; and at this time I somehow came across a copy of Cymbeline, which I read with great delight. Then we had our first riding-lessons. I well recall my dislike of riding, when my pony was fastened to a circus stake, which I had to go round and round. Unfortunately, much as my father wished it, I never became a good horsewoman. He himself was so good a rider, when all the gentlemen of the county were volunteers, that he could ride horses which no one else could ride—so my grandmother would tell me with pride—adding, “Your father and his brother (both six foot three) were the handsomest men among them all.” At that time he kept guard with his fellow-volunteers[Pg 5] over the French prisoners, who, he said, were always cheerful and always singing their patriotic songs.

But to return to my sisters and myself. For exercise we generally took long walks in the country, and I remember that when staying at my father’s house in Berkshire[3] we often used to wander up to a tower among our woods where a gaunt old lady lived, called Black Jane, who told our fortunes. We had our favourite theatricals, too, like other children. Our dramatic performances were frequent, and our plays were, some of them, drawn from Miss Edgeworth’s tales. I was always fond of music, and used to sing duets with my soldier cousin, Richard Sellwood.

At eight years old I was sent, with my sisters, to some ladies for daily lessons, and later to schools in Brighton and London, for my father disliked having a governess in the house. So, much as he objected to young girls being sent from home, school in our case seemed the lesser evil. My sisters liked school; to me it was dreadful. As soon as I reached the Brighton seminary, I remember that for weeks I appeared to be in a horrible dream, and the voices of the mistresses and the girls around me seemed to be all thin, like voices from the grave. I could not be happy away from my father, who was my idol, though after a while I grew more accustomed to the strange life. My father would never let us go the long, cold journey[Pg 6] at Christmas time from Brighton to Horncastle, but came up to town for the vacation, and took us for treats to the National Gallery, and other places of interest. Great was the joy, when the summer holidays arrived, and after travelling by coach through the day and night, we three sisters saw Whittlesea-mere gleaming under the sunrise. It seemed as if we were within sight of home.

When I was eighteen, my Aunt Betsy left us to live by herself alone. We spent rather recluse lives, but we were perfectly happy, my father reading to us every evening from about half-past eight to ten, the hour at which we had family prayers. Most delightful were the readings; for instance, all of Gibbon that could be read to us, Macaulay’s Essays, Sir Walter Scott’s novels. For my private reading he gave me Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso, Molière, Racine, Corneille. Later I read Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter; and for English—Pearson, Paley’s Translation of the Early Fathers, Coleridge’s works, Wordsworth, and of course Milton and Shakespeare. We had walks and drives and music and needlework. Now and again we dined in the neighbourhood, and some of the neighbours dined with us; and once a year my father asked all the legal luminaries of Horncastle to dinner with him.

Before my sister Louy married your Uncle Charles (Tennyson-Turner) in 1836, my cousin, Catherine Franklin, daughter of Sir Willingham Franklin, took up her abode with us, and we had several dances at our house. Two fancy-dress dances I well remember. Louy and I disliked visiting in London and in country-houses, and so we always refused, and sent Anne in our stead. My first ball, I thought an opening of the great portals of the world, and I looked forward to it almost with awe. It is rather curious that at one of my very few balls, Mr. Musters (Jack Musters his intimates called[Pg 7] him), who married Byron’s Mary Chaworth, should have asked for, and obtained, an introduction to me.

In 1842 came Catherine’s marriage to our true friend, Drummond Rawnsley, the parson of the Rawnsley family; and then my sister Anne married Charles Weld. After this my father and I lived together alone. The only change we had from our routine life was a journey, one summer, to Tours, with Anne and Charles Weld, and his brother Isaac Weld, the accomplished owner of Ravenswell, near Bray, in Ireland.

At your father’s home, Somersby, we used to have evenings of music and singing. Your Aunt Mary played on the harp as her father used to do. She was a splendid-looking girl, and would have made a beautiful picture. Then your Aunt Emily (beloved of Arthur Hallam) had wonderful eyes—depths on depths they seemed to have—and a fine profile. “Testa Romana” an old Italian said of her. She had more of the colouring of the South, inherited, perhaps, from a member of Madame de Maintenon’s family who married one of the Tennysons. Your father had also the same kind of colouring. All, brothers and sisters, were fair to see. Your father was kingly, masses of fine, wavy hair, very dark, with a pervading shade of gold, and long, as it was then worn. His manner was kind, simple, and dignified, with plenty of sportiveness flashing out from time to time. During my ten years’ separation from him the doctors believed I was going into a consumption, and the Lincolnshire climate was pronounced to be too cold for me; and we moved to London, to look for a home in the south of England. We found one at last at Hale near Farnham, which was called by your father “my paradise.” The recollection of this delightful country made me persuade your father eventually to build a house near Haslemere. We were married on June 13, 1850, at Shiplake on the Thames.

[Pg 8]

By Willingham Rawnsley

I

Tennyson’s Country

Lincolnshire is a big county, measuring seventy-five miles by forty-five, but it is perhaps the least well known of all the counties of England. The traveller by the Great Northern main line passes through but a small portion of its south-western fringe near Grantham; and if he goes along the eastern side from Peterborough to Grimsby or Hull, he gains no insight into the picturesque parts of the county, for the line takes him over the rich flat fenlands with their black vegetable mould devoid of any kind of stone or pebble, and intersected by those innumerable dykes or drains varying from 8 to 80 feet across, which give the southern division of Lincolnshire an aspect in harmony with its Batavian name “the parts of Holland.”

The Queen of this flat fertile plain is Boston, with her wonderful church-tower and lantern 280 feet high, a[Pg 9] marvel of symmetry when you are near it, and visible for more than twenty miles in all directions. Owing to its slender height it seems, from a distance, to stand up like a tall thick mast or tree-trunk, and is hence known to all the countryside as “Boston stump.”

At this town, the East Lincolnshire line divides: one section goes to the left to Lincoln; the other, following the bend of the coast at about seven miles’ distance from the sea, turns when opposite Skegness and runs, at right angles to its former course, to Louth,—Louth whose beautiful church spire was painted by Turner in his picture of “The Horse Fair.”

The more recent Louth-to-Lincoln line completes the fourth side of a square having Boston, Burgh, Louth, and Lincoln for its corners, which contains the fairest portion of the Lincolnshire wolds, and within this square is Somersby, Tennyson’s birthplace and early home. It is a tiny village surrounded by low green hills; and close at hand, here nestling in a leafy hollow, and there standing boldly on the “ridgèd wold,” are some half a dozen churches built of the local “greensand” rock, from whose towers the Poet in his boyhood heard:

The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist—

the mist which lay athwart those “long gray fields at night,” and marked the course of the beloved Somersby brook.

If we go past the little gray church with its perfect specimen of a pre-Reformation cross hard by the porch, and past the modest house almost opposite, which was for over thirty years the home of the Tennysons, we shall come at once to the point where the road dips to a little wood through which runs the rivulet so lovingly described by the Poet when he was leaving the home of his youth:

[Pg 10]Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

and again:

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove.

Northward, beyond the stream, the white road climbs the wold above Tetford, and disappears from sight. These wolds are chalk; the greensand ridge being all to the south of the valley, except just at Somersby and Bag-Enderby, where the sandrock crops up by the roadside, and in the little wood by the brook.

This small deep channelled brook with sandy bottom—over which one may on any bright day see, as described in “Enid,”

a shoal
Of darting fish, that on a summer morn...
Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand,
But if a man who stands upon the brink
But lift a shining hand against the sun,
There is not left the twinkle of a fin
Betwixt the cressy islets white with flower—

was very dear to Tennyson. When in his “Ode to Memory” he bids Memory

Come from the woods which belt the gray hillside,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father’s door,

he adds:

And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn
In every elbow and turn,
The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland,
O! hither lead thy feet!

[Pg 11]If we follow this

pastoral rivulet that swerves
To left and right thro’ meadowy curves,
That feed the mothers of the flock,

we, too, shall hear

the livelong bleat
Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds
Upon the ridgèd wolds.

And shall see the cattle in the rich grass land, and mark on the right the green-gray tower of Spilsby, where so many of the Franklin family lived and died, the family of whom his future bride was sprung.

Still keeping by the brook, we shall see, past the tower of Bag-Enderby which adjoins Somersby, “The gray hill side” rising up behind the Old Hall of Harrington, and

The Quarry trenched along the hill
And haunted by the wrangling daw,

above which runs the chalky “ramper” or turnpike-road which leads along the eastern ridge of the wold to Alford, whence you proceed across the level Marsh to the sea at Mablethorpe.

The Marsh in Lincolnshire is a word of peculiar significance. The whole country is either fen, wold, or marsh. The wolds, starting from Keal and Alford, run in two ridges on either side of the Somersby Valley, one going north to Louth and onwards, and one west by Spilsby and Horncastle to Lincoln. Here it joins the great spine-bone of the county on which, straight as an arrow for many a mile northwards, runs the Roman Ermine Street; and but for the Somersby brook these two ridges from Louth and Lincoln would unite at Spilsby, whence the greensand formation, which begins at Raithby, sends out two spurs, one eastwards, ending abruptly at Halton, while the other pushes a couple of miles farther south, until at Keal the road drops suddenly[Pg 12] into the level fen, giving a view—east, south, and west—of wonderful extent and colour, ending to the east with the sea, and to the south with the tall pillar of Boston Church standing up far above the horizon. This flat land is the fen; all rich cornland and all well drained, but with few habitations, and with absolutely no hill or even rise in the ground until, passing Croyland or Crowland Abbey, which once dominated a veritable land of fens only traversable by boats, you come, on the farther side of Peterborough, to the great North Road. Such views as this from Keal, and the similar one from Lincoln Minster, which looks out far to the south-west over a similar large tract of fen, are not to be surpassed in all the land.

But the Poet’s steps from Somersby would not as a rule go westwards. The coast would oftener be his aim; and leaving Spilsby to the right, and the old twice-plague-stricken village of Partney, where the Somersby rivulet becomes a river, he would pass from “the high field on the bushless pike” to Miles-cross-hill, whence the panorama unfolds which he has depicted in Canto XI. of “In Memoriam”:

Calm and still light on yon great plain,
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main.

Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to

Some lowly cottage whence we see
Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky.

This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called the Marsh, a strip between five and eight miles wide,[Pg 13] running parallel with the coast from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from

the sandbuilt ridge
Of heaped hills that mound the sea.

This strip of land is not marsh in the ordinary sense of the word, but a belt of the richest grass land, all level and with no visible fences, each field being surrounded by a broad dyke or ditch with deep water, hidden in summer by the tall feathery plumes of the “whispering reeds.” Across this belt the seawind sweeps for ever. The Poet may allude to this when, in his early poem, “Sir Galahad,” he writes:

But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields;

and “the hard grey weather” sung by Kingsley breeds a race of hardy gray-eyed men with long noses, the manifest descendants of the Danes who peopled all that coast, and gave names to most of the villages there, nine-tenths of which end in “by.”

This rich pasture-land runs right up to the sand-dunes,—Nature’s own fortification made by the winds and waves which is just outside the Dutch and Roman embankments, and serves better than all the works of man to keep out the waters of the North Sea from the low-lying levels of the Marsh and Fen.

The lines in the “Lotos-Eaters”:

They sat them down upon the yellow sand
Between the sun and moon upon the shore,

describes what the Poet might at any time of full moon have seen from that “sand-built ridge” with the red sun setting over the wide marsh, and the full moon rising out of the eastern sea; and “The wide winged sunset of the misty marsh” recalls one of the most noticeable features of that particular locality, where, across the limitless windy plain, the sun would set in[Pg 14] regal splendour; and when “cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn” his rising over the sea would be equally magnificent in colour.

Having crossed the “Marsh” by a raised road with deep wide dykes on either side, and no vestige of hedge or tree in sight, except where a row of black poplars or aspens form a screen from the searching wind round a group of the plainest of farm buildings, red brick with roofing of black glazed pan-tiles, you come to the once tiny village of Mablethorpe, sheltering right under the sea-bank, the wind-blown sands of which are held together by the penetrating roots of the tussocks of long, coarse, sharp-edged grass, and the prickly bushes of sea buckthorn, gray-leaved and orange-berried.

You top the sand-ridge, and below, to right and left, far as eye can see, stretch the flat, brown sands. Across these the tide, which at the full of the moon comes right up to the barrier, goes out for three-quarters of a mile; of this the latter half is left by the shallow wavelets all ribbed, as you see it on the ripple-marked stone of the Horsham quarries, and shining with the bright sea-water which reflects the low rays of the sun; while far off, so far that they seem to be mere toys, the shrimper slowly drives his small horse and cart, to the tail of which is attached the primitive purse net, the other end of it being towed by the patient, long-haired donkey, ridden by a boy whose bare feet dangle in the shallow wavelets. Farther to the south the tide ebbs quite out of sight. This is at “Gibraltar Point,” near Wainfleet Haven, where Somersby brook at length finds the sea, a place very familiar to the Poet in his youth. The skin of mud on the sands makes them shine like burnished copper in the level rays of the setting sun, which here have no sandbank to intercept them, but at other times it is a scene of dreary desolation, such as is aptly described in “The Passing of Arthur”:

[Pg 15]a coast
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

It was near this part of the shore that, as a young man, he often walked, rolling out his lines aloud or murmuring them to himself, a habit which was also that of Wordsworth, and led in each case to the peasants supposing the Poet to be “craäzed,” and caused the Somersby cook to wonder “what Mr. Awlfred was always a-praying for,” and caused also the fisherman, whom he met on the sands once at 4 A.M. as he was walking without hat or coat, and to whom he bid good-morning, to reply, “Thou poor fool, thou doesn’t knaw whether it be night or daä.”

But at Mablethorpe the sea does not go out nearly so far, and at high tide it comes right up to the bank with splendid menacing waves, the memory of which furnished him, five and thirty years after he had left Lincolnshire for ever, with the famous simile 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.

This accurately describes the flat Lincolnshire coast with its “interminable rollers” breaking on the endless sands, than which waves the Poet always said that he had never anywhere seen grander, and the clap of the wave as it fell on the hard sand could be heard across that flat country for miles. Doubtless this is what prompted the lines in “Locksley Hall”:

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

“We hear in this,” says the “Lincolnshire Rector,”[4][Pg 16] writing in Macmillan’s Magazine of December 1873, “the mighty sound of the breakers as they fling themselves at full tide with long-gathered force upon the slope sands of Skegness or Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, nowhere is ocean grander in a storm; nowhere is the thunder of the sea louder, nor its waves higher, nor the spread of their waters on the beach wider.”

It is not only of the breakers that the Poet has given us pictures. Along these sands it was his wont, no doubt, as it has often been that of the writer,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray,

and it is still Skegness and Mablethorpe which may have furnished him with his simile in “The Dream of Fair Women”:

So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land
Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,
Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,
Torn from the fringe of spray.

Walking along the shore as the tide goes out, you come constantly on creeks and pools left by the receding waves,

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.[5]

or little dimpled hollows of brine, formed by the wind-swept water washing round some shell or stone:

As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long
A little bitter pool about a stone
On the bare coast.[6]

Many characteristics of Lincolnshire scenery and of Somersby in particular are introduced in “In Memoriam.”

[Pg 17]In Canto LXXXIX. the poet speaks of the hills which shut in the Somersby Valley on the north:

Nor less it pleased in lustier moods
Beyond the bounding hill to stray.

In XCV. he speaks of the knolls, elsewhere described as “The hoary knolls of ash and haw,” where the cattle lie on a summer night:

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d
The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:

and in Canto C. he calls to mind:

The sheepwalk up the windy wold,

and many other features seen in his walks with Arthur Hallam at Somersby.

In “Mariana” we have:

From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn,
About the lonely moated grange.

But no picture is more complete and accurate and remarkable than that of a wet day in the Marsh and on the sands of 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.

From what we have said it will be clear to the reader that while it is the fen land only that the railway traveller sees, it is the Marsh and the Wolds—and particularly in Lord Tennyson’s mind the Wolds—that[Pg 18] make the characteristic charm of the county, a charm of which so many illustrations are to be found throughout his poems. Certainly in her wide extended views, in the open wolds with the villages and their gray church towers nestling in the sheltered nooks at the wold foot, and also (to quote again from the “Lincolnshire Rector”) “in her glorious parish churches and gigantic steeples, Lincolnshire has charms and beauties of her own. And as to fostering genius, has she not proved herself to be the ‘meet nurse of a poetic child’? for here, be it remembered, here in the heart of the land, in Mid-Lincolnshire, Alfred Tennyson was born, here he spent all his earliest and freshest days; here he first felt the divine afflatus, and found fit material for his muse:

II

The Somersby Friends

It is no wonder that the Tennysons loved Somersby. They were a large family, and here they grew up together, making their own world and growing ever more fond of the place for its associations. “How[Pg 19] often have I longed to be with you at Somersby!” writes Alfred Tennyson’s sister, Mary,[7] thirteen years after leaving the old home. “How delightful that name sounds to me! Visions of sweet past days rise up before my eyes, when life itself was new,

And the heart promised what the fancy drew.”

Here, when childhood’s happy days were over, the Tennyson girls rejoiced in the society of their brothers’ Cambridge friends, and, though the village was so remote that they only got a post two or three times a week,[8] here they not only drank in contentedly the beauty of the country, but also passed delightful days with talk and books, with music and poetry, and dance and song, when, on the lawn at Somersby, one of the sisters

brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon.

Here, as Arthur Hallam said, “Alfred’s mind was moulded in silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of Nature.”

I have said that they made their own world; and they were well able to do it, for they were a very remarkable family. The Doctor was a very tall, dark man, very strict with his boys, to whom he was schoolmaster as well as parent. He was a scholar, and unusually well read, and possessed a good library. Clever, too, he was with his hands, and carved the stone chimney-piece in the dining-room, which his man Horlins built under his direction. He and his wife were a great contrast, for she was very small and gentle and highly sensitive.

Edward FitzGerald speaks of her as “one of the most innocent and tender-hearted ladies I ever saw”; and the[Pg 20] Poet depicts her in “Isabel,” where he speaks of her gentle voice, her keen intellect and her

Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign
The summer calm of golden charity.

Mary was the letter-writer of the family, and a very clever woman, and her letters show that she knew her Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge as well as her brother’s poems.

They were a united family, but Charles and Alfred were nearest to her in age. She writes to one of her great friends: “O my beloved, what creatures men are! my brothers are the exception to this general rule.” Accordingly, of Charles she writes: “If ever there was a sweet delightful character it is that dear Charley,” and of Alfred: “A. is one of the noblest of his kind. You know my opinion of men in general is much like your own; they are not like us, they are naturally more selfish and not so affectionate.” She adds:

After leaving Somersby she felt the loss of these brothers sorely.

Alfred’s devotion to his mother was always perfect. In October 1850 Mary writes from Cheltenham:

But though life at Cheltenham when the brothers were all away was dull for Mary, it had not been so at Somersby; for there they had home interests sufficient to keep them always occupied, and they were not without neighbours. Ormsby was close at hand, to the north, where lived as Rector, Frank Massingberd, afterwards Chancellor of Lincoln, a man of cultivation and old-world courtesy. His wife Fanny was one of the charming Miss Barings of Harrington, which was but a couple of miles off to the east. Her sister Rosa was that “sole rose of beauty, loveliness complete,” to whom the Poet wrote such charming little birthday verses; and sixty-five years afterwards Rosa, then Mrs. Duncombe Shafto, still spoke with enthusiasm of those happy days. Mrs. Baring had married for her second husband, Admiral Eden, a man of great conversational powers, and with a very large circle of interesting friends. He took the old Hall of Harrington, with its fine brick front, from the Cracrofts, who moved to Hackthorn near Lincoln, and thus the families at Harrington and Somersby saw a great deal of one another.

There were two Eden daughters, the strikingly handsome Dulcibella and her sister, who looked after the house and its guests. Hence their nicknames of “Dulce” and “Utile.”

A mile or two beyond Harrington was Langton, where Dr. Johnson came to visit his friend Bennet Langton, who died only seven years before Dr. Tennyson came to Somersby. But, though the Langtons were friends of the Doctor’s, this was not a house the young people[Pg 22] much frequented. Mary, having come back to the old neighbourhood, writes from Scremby: “I am going to Langton to-morrow to spend a few days with the Langtons, don’t you pity me? I hope I shall get something more out of Mrs. Langton than Indeed, Yes, No!”

Adjoining Langton the Tennysons had friends in the Swans of Saucethorpe, and a little farther eastwards was Partney, where George Maddison and his mother lived. He was a hero, of whom tales were told of many courageous deeds, such as his going single-handed and taking a desperate criminal who, being armed, had barricaded himself in an old building and set all the police at defiance. It was a question whether people most admired the courage of the man or the beauty of his charming wife, Fanny, one of the three good-looking daughters of Sir Alan Bellingham, who all found husbands in that neighbourhood. In the Lincolnshire poem, “The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts,” the Poet has immortalized their name:

Goä to the laäne at the back, and loök thruf Maddison’s gaäte!

From Partney the hill rises to Dalby, where lived John Bourne, whose wife was an aunt of the young Tennysons, and here they would meet the handsome Miss Bournes of Alford; one, Margaret, was dark, the other was Alice, a beautiful fair girl. They married brothers, Marcus and John Huish. Mrs. John Bourne was the Doctor’s sister Mary, and the young Tennysons would have been oftener at Dalby had it been their Aunt Elizabeth Russell[10] who lived there, of whom they always spoke in terms of the strongest affection.

The old house at Dalby was burnt down in 1841. About this Mr. Marcus Huish tells me that his mother wrote in a diary at the time:

and on the 7th Mrs. Huish wrote:

The letter was a long one, two pages being left for it in the diary, but unfortunately it was never copied in.

The villages here are very close together, and going from Partney, two miles eastward, you come to Skendleby, where Sir Edward Brackenbury lived, whose elder brother Sir John was Consul at Cadiz, and used to send over some good pictures and some strong sherry, known by the diners-out as “the Consul’s sherry.” The Rector of the next village of Scremby was also a Brackenbury, and here Mary Tennyson most loved to visit. Mrs. Brackenbury, whom she always calls “Gloriana,” was adored by all who knew her. Mary says, “She is so sweet a character, and she has always been so kind and so anxious for our family ... I look upon her as already a saint.” Two of the Rectors of Halton had also been Brackenburys—a father and son in succession, and they were followed by two generations of Rawnsleys—Thomas Hardwicke and his son Drummond.

Adjoining Scremby is Candlesby, where Tennyson’s genial friend, John Alington, who had married another of the beautiful Miss Bellinghams, was Rector; and within half a mile is Gunby, the delightful old home of the Massingberds. In Dr. Tennyson’s time Peregrine Langton, who had married the heiress of the Massingberds and taken her name, was living there.

It was from Gunby that Algernon Massingberd disappeared, going to America and never being heard[Pg 24] of again, which gave rise to a romance in “Novel” form, that came out many years later called The Lost Sir Massingberd. Going on eastward still, by Boothby, where Dr. Tennyson’s friends the Walls family lived, in a house to which you drove up across the grass pasture, the sheep grazing right up to the front door, a thing still common in the Lincolnshire Marsh, you come to Burgh, with its magnificent Church tower and old carved woodwork. Here was the house of Sir George Crawford, and here from the edge of the high ground on which the Church stands you plunge down on to the level Marsh across which, at five miles’ distance, is Skegness, at that time only a handful of fishermen’s cottages, with “Hildred’s Hotel,” one good house occupied by a large tenant farmer, and a reed-thatched house right on the old Roman sea bank, built by Miss Walls, only one room thick, so that from the same room she could see both the sunrise and the sunset. Here all the neighbourhood at different times would meet, and enjoy the wide prospect of sea and Marsh and the broad sands and the splendid air. When the tide was out the only thing to be seen, as far as eye could reach, were the two or three fishermen, like specks on the edge of the sea, and the only sounds were the piping of the various sea-birds, stints, curlews, and the like, as they flew along the creeks or over the gray sand-dunes. Mablethorpe was nearer to Somersby, but had no house of any size at which, as here, the dwellers on the wold knew that they were always welcome.

But we have other houses to visit, so let us return by Burgh and Bratoft, where above the chancel arch of the ugly brick Church is a remarkable picture of the Spanish Armada, represented as a huge red dragon, with the ships of Effingham’s fleet painted in the corner of the picture.

Passing Bratoft, the next thing we come to is the[Pg 25] Somersby brook, which is here “the Halton River,” and on the greensand ridge, overlooking the fen as far as “Boston Stump,” stands the fine Church of Halton Holgate. In this Church, as at Harrington, Alfred as a boy must have seen the old stone effigy of a Crusader as described in “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”

with his feet upon the hound,
Cross’d! for once he sailed the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride.

The road ascends the “hollow way” cut through the greensand, and a timber footbridge is flung across it leading from the Church to the Rectory. Dr. Tennyson could tell the story of how his old friend T. H. Rawnsley, the Rector, and Mr. Eden, brother of the Admiral, being in London, looked in at the great Globe in Leicester Square and heard a man lecturing on Geology. They listened till they heard “This Greensand formation here disappears” (he was speaking of Sussex) “and crops up again in an obscure little village called Halton Holgate in Lincolnshire.” “Come along, Eden!” said the Rector; “this is a very stupid fellow.”

Halton was the house, and Mr. and Mrs. Rawnsley the people, whom Dr. Tennyson most loved to visit. She had been previously known to him as the beautiful Miss Walls of Boothby. The Rector was the most genial and agreeable of men, and her charm of look and manner made his wife a universal favourite.

Here are two characteristic letters from Dr. Tennyson to Mr. Rawnsley:

This letter was addressed to the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, Halton Parsonage. The next was addressed to Halton Palace, and runs thus:

The friendship between the families, which was further cemented when the Rector’s son Drummond married Kate Franklin, whose cousin, Emily Sellwood, afterwards became the Poet’s wife, has been maintained for three generations. Alfred shared his father’s opinion of Halton, and often wrote both to the Rector and his wife. In one letter to her, after pleading a low state of health and spirits as his reason for not joining her party at Halton, he says: “At the same time, believe me it is not without considerable uneasiness that I absent myself from a house where I visit with greater pleasure than at any other in the country, if indeed I may be said to visit any other.”

After leaving Somersby, he wrote on Jan. 28, 1838, from High Beech, Epping Forest:

To this letter Mrs. Tennyson, the Poet’s mother, adds a postscript, though she complains that Alfred has scarcely left her room to do so. The letter is dated in her hand.

[Pg 28]The Halton family consisted of Edward, Drummond, and Sophy. The latter, with Rosa Baring, were two of Alfred’s favourite partners at the Spilsby and Horncastle balls. Sophy Rawnsley became Mrs. Ed. Elmhirst; she often talked of the old Halton and Somersby days. “He was,” she said, “so interesting, because he was so unlike other young men; and his unconventionality of manner and dress had a charm which made him more acceptable than the dapper young gentleman of the ordinary type at ball or supper party. He was a splendid dancer, for he loved music, and kept such time; but you know,” she would say, “we liked to talk better than to dance together at Horncastle, or Spilsby, or Halton; he always had something worth saying, and said it so quaintly.” Rosa at eighty-three recalled the same times with animation, and said to me, “You know we used to spoil him, for we sat at his feet and worshipped him; and he read to us, and how well he read! and when he wrote us those little poems we were more than proud. Ah, those days at Somersby and Harrington and Halton, how delightful they were!”

The Halton family were a decade younger than Charles, Alfred, and Mary Tennyson, but Drummond married eight years before Alfred. Emily Sellwood, just before her marriage with Alfred, wrote to Mrs. Drummond Rawnsley:

The use of the thy is very frequent with the Sellwoods, and in all Mary Tennyson’s letters too.

It was at Halton, in the time of its next Rector, Drummond Rawnsley, that the farmer Gilbey Robinson gave his son Canon H. D. Rawnsley the famous advice[Pg 29] which the Poet has preserved in his Lincolnshire poem “The Churchwarden and the Curate”:

But creeäp along the hedge bottoms an thou’ll be a Bishop yit.

And it was at Halton that Mr. Hoff, a large tenant farmer, lived of whom Dr. Tennyson heard many a story from the Rector. He was quite a character, and the Lord Chancellor Brougham was brought over by Mr. Eden from Harrington to see and talk with him. I knew Mr. Hoff, and have heard the Rector describe the lively afternoon they had. Farming was one of Lord Brougham’s hobbies, and he talked of farming to his heart’s content, and was delighted with the old fellow’s shrewdness and independence, and his racy sayings in the Lincolnshire dialect, the kind of sayings which Tennyson has preserved in his “Northern Farmer.” The farmer, too, was pleased with his visitor, but he said to the Rector afterwards, “He is straänge cliver mon is Lord Brougham, and he knaws a vast, noä doubt, but he knaws nowt about ploughing.” It was the same farmer who was introduced by the Rector to the leading Barrister at the Spilsby sessions, where both the Rector and Dr. Tennyson were always in request to dine with the bar, when the Judge was at Spilsby, for the charm of their presence and the brightness of their conversation. Mr. Hoff had seen “Councillor Flowers” in Court in his wig and gown, but meeting him now in plain clothes, and finding him a very small man, he said to him straight out, “Why, you’re nobbut a meän-looking little mon after all.” These tenant farmers, whether in the Marsh, wold, or fen, were very considerable people in days when agriculture was at its best. In the Marsh, one in particular, Marshal Heanley, was always termed the Marsh King. He it was who at the Ram-show dinner at Halton, when Ed. Stanhope, the Minister for War, had spoken of the future which was opening for the[Pg 30] great agriculturists, and, after alluding to Lord Brougham’s visit to the Shire and the sending of some farmers’ sons to the Bar, had suggested the possibility of one of them arriving at the top of the tree and sitting some day on the Woolsack. The “Marsh King” got up and said, “I allus telled yer yer must graw wool; but when you’ve grawed it, yer mustn’t sit on it, yer must sell it.”

There was a good deal of humour and also of characteristic independence about both the farmers and their men in those days; the Doctor’s own man, when found fault with, had flung the harness in a heap on the drawing-room floor, saying, “Cleän it yersen then.” And at Halton Rectory an old Waterloo cavalryman was coachman, who kept in the saddle-room the sword he had drawn at Quatre-Bras, a delight to us boys to see and hear about. He had a way of thinking aloud, and when, driving once at Skegness, he saw the Halton schoolmaster, his particular aversion, Mrs. Rawnsley heard him say, “If there ain’t that conceäted aäpe of ourn.” On a later occasion, when, at a rent-day dinner, he was handing round the beer, and the schoolmaster asked, “Is it ale or porter?” in a voice heard by all the table he replied, “It’s näyther aäle nor poörter, but very good beer, much too good for the likes o’ you, so taäke it and be thankful.” Perhaps his most famous saying was addressed to my younger brother who, when attempting to copy his elders who always jumped the quickset hedge opposite the saddle-room as a short cut to the house, had stuck in the thorns and cried, “Grayson, Grayson, come and help me out!” The old man slowly wiped his hands, and with his usual deliberation said, “Yis, I’m a-coming.” “But look sharp, confound you, it’s pricking me.” “Oh, if you’re going to sweër you may stay theër, and be damned to you.”

From Halton the way is short to Spilsby, the market[Pg 31] town where the Franklins had lived, and the statue of Sir John resting his hand on an anchor looks down every Monday on the chaffering Market folk at one end of the Market Place, whilst the women still crowd round the old Butter-cross at the other end. In the Church is the Willoughby chapel, full of interesting monuments.

Many of the Franklin family lie in the Churchyard, and on the Church wall are three tablets to the three most distinguished brothers,—James, the soldier, who made the first ordnance survey of India; Sir Willingham, the Judge of the Supreme Court of Madras; and Sir John, the discoverer of the North-West Passage. Hundleby adjoins Spilsby where Mr. John Hollway lived, of whom the Poet wrote: “People say and I feel that you are the man with the finest taste and knowledge in literary matters here.” Next to Hundleby comes Raithby, the home of the Edward Rawnsleys, where the Poet was a frequent visitor, and thence passing Mavis-Enderby on the left, the road runs on the Ridge of the Wold through Hagworthingham to Horncastle, the home of the Sellwoods. Mavis-Enderby is referred to in Jean Ingelow’s poem, “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571”:

Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!
······
The brides of Mavis Enderby.

After a visit to Raithby in 1874 Alfred wrote to Mrs. Edward Rawnsley:

At Keal, east of Mavis-Enderby, the Cracrofts, whom the Doctor knew well, were living; and below the[Pg 32] far-famed Keal Hill, in the flat fen, lay Hagnaby Priory, the home of Thomas Coltman, whose nephews Tom and George were often there. George, a genial giant of the heartiest kind, became Rector of Stickney, half-way between Keal and Boston; he was one of the Poet’s closest friends. In a letter to the Rector of Halton he says, “Remember me to all old friends, particularly to George Coltman”; and in after years he seldom met a Lincolnshire man without asking, “How is George Coltman? He was a good fellow.” Agricultural depression has altered things in Lincolnshire. Among the farmers the larger holders have disappeared in many places, and in the pleasant homes of Halton and Somersby, such men as the Rectors in those Georgian and early Victorian days, Nature does not repeat.

The departure of the Tennyson family made a blank which could never be filled. The villagers whom they left behind never forgot them, and even in extreme old age they were still full of memories of the family, and talked of the learning and cleverness of “the owd Doctor,” the fondness of the children for their mother and, most noticeable of all, their “book-larning,”

The old folk all seemed to think that “to hev owt to do wi boöks” was a sign of a weak intellect. “The boys, poor things! they would allus hev a book i’ their hands as they went along.” A few years ago there was still one old woman in Somersby who remembered going, seventy-one years back, when she was eleven years old, for her first place to the Tennysons. What she thought most of was “the young laädies.” She was blind, but she said, “I can see ’em all now plaän as plaän; and I would have liked to hear Mr. Halfred’s voice ageän—sich a voice it wer.”

Frederick Tennyson.

[Pg 33]

By Charles Tennyson[11]

Of all the brothers of Alfred Tennyson the closest akin to him were Frederick and Charles. The three were born in successive years, Frederick in 1807, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. They slept together in a little attic under the roof of the old white Rectory at Somersby, they played together, read together, studied together under the guidance of their father, and all three left home to go together to the school at Louth, which Alfred and Charles at least held in detestation until their latest years. Frederick was the first to break up the[Pg 34] brotherhood, for, in 1817, he left Louth for Eton, but to the end of his long life—he outlived all his brothers—he seems to have looked back on the days of his childhood through the medium of this fraternal trinity. Years afterwards he wrote of their common submission to the influence of Byron, who “lorded it over them, with an immitigable tyranny,” and a fire at Farringford in 1876 brings to his mind the destruction of their Aunt Mary’s house at Louth, in the gardens of which he wrote: “I, and Charles, and Alfred, enthusiastic children, used to play at being Emperors of China, each appropriating a portion of the old echoing garden as our domain, and making them reverberate our tones of authority.”

At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and strength would have well qualified them to excel, and passed their time chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat shores of their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the Poems by Two Brothers, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John’s, Cambridge (his father’s old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the £10 which the publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoarse on the shore as they rolled out poem by poem in one another’s ears. The notes and headings to the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from Byron, five[Pg 35] from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa’s Voyages, Beattie, Rennel’s Herodotus, Savary’s Letters, Tacitus’ Annals, Pliny, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Racine, the Mysteries of Udolpho, La Auruncana, the Songs of Jayadeva, Sir William Jones (History of Nadir Shah, Eastern Plants, and Works, vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful, Dr. Langhorne’s Collins, Mason’s Caractacus, Rollin, Contino’s Epitaph on Camoens, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young, Sale’s Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature, Sallust, Terence, Lucretius, Coxe’s Switzerland, Rousseau, the Ranz des Vaches, Baker on Animalculae, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd scraps of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.

Alfred and Charles followed Frederick to Cambridge in 1828 and entered Trinity, whither their elder brother had just migrated from John’s. All the three brothers attained a certain amount of rather unconventional distinction at the University; Frederick, who had taken a high place on his entrance into Eton and subsequently became Captain of the Oppidans, obtained the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode (in Sapphic metre) on the Pyramids, the last cadence of which, “ὀλλυμένων γὰρ ἄχθων ἐξαπολειται,” is the only fragment which tradition has preserved. Charles obtained a Bell Scholarship in 1829, chiefly through the beauty of his translations into English (one line, “And the ruddy grape shall droop from the desert thorn,” was always remembered by Alfred), and the youngest brother secured, as is well known, the University Prize for English Verse with his “Timbuctoo.” None of the brothers, however, attained[Pg 36] great distinction in the schools, though Frederick and Charles graduated B.A. in 1832. With the end of their Cambridge careers the brotherhood finally dissolved. It was at first proposed that all three should (in deference to the wish of their grandfather), become clergymen. Frederick had always shown a certain independence and intractability of character. At Eton, though a skilful and ardent cricketer, he acquired a reputation for eccentricity, and Sir Francis Doyle describes him as “rather a silent, solitary boy, not always in perfect harmony with Keate,”—a gentleman with whom most spirits, however ardent, generally found it convenient to agree.

Sir Francis recounts one typical incident: Frederick, then in the sixth form, had returned to school four days late after the Long Vacation. Keate sent for him and demanded an explanation. None was forthcoming. Keate stormed in his best manner, his prominent eyebrows shooting out, and his Punch-like features working with fury, Frederick remaining all the while cynically calm. Finally the fiery doctor insists with many objurgations on a written apology from the boy’s father, whereupon the culprit leisurely produces a crumpled letter from his pocket and hands it coolly to the head-master. A fresh tirade follows, accusing Frederick of every defect of character and principle known to ethics, and concluding, “and showing such a temper too”!

How little Frederick regarded himself as fitted for Holy Orders may be judged from a letter he wrote in 1832 to his friend John Frere: “I expect,” he says, “to be ordained in June, without much reason, for hitherto I have made no kind of preparation, and a pretty parson I shall make, I’m thinking.” The grandfather came apparently to share this conclusion, for the ordination never took place.

It must have been about this time that Frederick[Pg 37] made the acquaintance of Edward FitzGerald, who was two years his junior. The pair maintained a close correspondence for many years, and “Fitz” became godfather to one of his friend’s sons and left a legacy to be divided among his three daughters.

Frederick’s fine presence and frank, tempestuous, independent nature seem to have made a powerful appeal to the younger man, for he had the great height, noble proportions, and dome-like forehead of the Tennyson family, and was so robustly built that it is said that in later years, when he lived in Florence, a new servant girl, on seeing him for the first time speeding up his broad Italian staircase in British knee-breeches, fell back against the wall in astonishment, exclaiming, “Santissima Madonna, che gambe!” Unlike his brothers, however, his hair (which he wore rather longer than was common even at that time) was fair and his eyes blue.

And in the next year he writes:

And seven years later Gravesend and its ἀνήριθμοι shrimps are still in his memory.

Very soon, however, after leaving Cambridge,[Pg 38] Frederick, who had inherited a comfortable property at Grimsby, set out for Italy, and in Italy and near the Mediterranean he remained, with the exception of an occasional visit to England, until 1859.

He was passionately fond of travel, which, as he used to say, “makes pleasure solemn and pain sweet,” and even his marriage in 1839 to Maria Giuliotti, daughter of the chief magistrate of Siena, could not induce him to make a settled home. In 1841 we hear of him (through “Fitz”) in Sicily, playing a cricket match against the crew of the Bellerophon on the Parthenopaean Hills, and “sacking the sailors by ninety runs.” “I like that such men as Frederick should be abroad,” adds the writer, “so strong, haughty, and passionate,” and in 1842 “Fitz” pictures him “laughing and singing, and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of the warm South.” All the while he continued to write to FitzGerald “accounts of Italy, finer” (says the latter) “than any I ever heard.”

Once he describes himself coming suddenly upon Cicero’s Formian villa, with its mosaic pavement leading through lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain bubbling up “as fresh as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator sitting there in the stillness of the noonday, devoting the siesta hours to study.” FitzGerald replies with letters full of affection; he sighs for Frederick’s “Englishman’s humours”—for their old quarrels: “I mean quarrel in the sense of a good, strenuous difference of opinion, supported on either side by occasional outbursts of spleen. Come and let us try,” he adds, “you used to irritate my vegetable blood.” “I constantly think of you,” he writes, “and as I have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love I feel towards but two or three friends ... you, Spedding, Thackeray, and only one or two more.” And again: “It is because there are so few F. Tennysons in the[Pg 39] world that I do not like to be wholly out of hearing of the one I know.... I see so many little natures that I must draw to the large.”

All this time Frederick was writing verse and Fitz constantly urges him to publish. “You are now the only man I expect verse from,” he writes in 1850, after he had given Alfred up as almost wholly fallen from grace. “Such gloomy, grand stuff as you write.” Again: “We want some bits of strong, genuine imagination.... There are heaps of single lines, couplets, and stanzas that would consume the ——s and ——s like stubble.”

Much of their correspondence is taken up with the discussion of music. They both agree in placing Mozart above all other composers. Beethoven they find too analytical and erudite. Original, majestic, and profound, they acknowledge him, but at times bizarre and morbid.

“We all raved about Byron, Shelley, and Keats,” wrote Frederick long after, in 1885, “but none of them have retained their hold on me with the same power as that little tone poet with the long nose, knee-breeches, and pigtail.” Indeed he was at different times told by two mediums that the spirit of Mozart in these same knee-breeches and pigtail accompanied him, invisibly to the eye of sense, as a familiar. Music was the passion of Frederick Tennyson’s life. It was said among his friends that when he settled in Florence (as he did soon after 1850), he lived in a vast Hall designed by Michael Angelo, surrounded by forty fiddlers, and he used to improvise on a small organ until he was over eighty years of age.

Frederick lived at Florence till 1857 and found there, after years of wandering, his first settled home. The idea of settling tickled his humour, and in 1853 he writes: “I am a regular family man now with four children (the last of whom promises to be the most eccentric of a humorous set) and an Umbrella.” In Florence he came in contact with Caroline Norton and her son Brinsley, of the latter of whom he writes an amusing account:

But Frederick was too much of a man of moods to care for society. He used to describe himself as a “person of gloomy insignificance and unsocial monomania.” Society he dismissed contemptuously as “Snookdom,” and would liken it gruffly to a street row. The “high-jinks of the high-nosed” (to use another phrase of his) angered him, as did all persons “who go about with[Pg 42] well-cut trousers and ill-arranged ideas.” The consequence was that his acquaintance in Florence long remained narrow. In 1854, shortly after the birth of his second son, he wrote:

One hears, however, of a visit of Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide Kemble) in 1854. “I had not seen her for twenty years,” writes Frederick; “she is grown colossal, but all her folds of fat have not extinguished the love of music in her.” But one friendship which Frederick made in Florence was destined to be a lifelong pleasure to him. In 1853 he writes:

In 1854 he published his first volume of verse, Days and Hours. The book was, on the whole, well received. Charles Kingsley (whose early and discriminating recognition of the merits of George Meredith places him high among the critics of his day) wrote: “The poems are[Pg 43] the work of a finished scholar, of a man who knows all schools, who has profited more or less by all, and who often can express himself, while revelling in luxurious fancies, with a grace and terseness which Pope himself might have envied.” There was, however, a good deal of adverse criticism, and it was probably mainly owing to his irritation at many of the strictures (often futile enough) which were passed upon him at this time that he kept silence for the next thirty-six years. At any rate, he was always ready to the end of his life for a growl or a thunder at the critics.

In 1857 Frederick Tennyson left Florence and after spending some time in Pisa and Genoa finally settled in Jersey, where he made his home for nearly forty years. During all this period he maintained a regular and detailed correspondence with Mrs. Brotherton, the wife of his friend Augustus Brotherton, the artist, with whom he had begun to exchange letters while still at Florence. His life was now a very quiet one, for, except for an occasional visit to England, he never left home. His children with their families visited him from time to time. His brother Charles came with his wife to see him in 1867, as did the Brownings on their way to Italy, and Alfred also paid him visits, the last of which was in 1892. On the whole, however, his days, for one who had been so passionately fond of travel and of a life of colour, warmth, and excitement, were singularly peaceful. But he retained to the last his astonishing vitality. His health remained tolerably good in spite of the nervous irritability and reactions of melancholy which were inseparable from the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his temperament. “Poor Savile Morton used to stare at me with wonder,” he writes. “‘I cannot conceive,’ he said, ‘how a man with such a stomach can be subject to hypochondria.’” In 1867, at the age of sixty, he batted for an hour to his nephew Lionel’s bowling, hoping[Pg 44] thereby to be able “to revive the cricket habit,” and his mind continued extraordinarily active; not a movement in world politics or thought escaped him; he read voraciously and continued to write verse in a rather desultory fashion. His appetite for beauty, too, remained as keen as ever and even developed. “The longer I live,” he wrote in 1885, “the more delicate become my perceptions of beautiful nature.” And that appetite found ample food in the scenery of the bowery island, the whole ambit of which, with its curling tree-tops and distant lawny spaces dappled with sunshine and surrounded, as it seemed, by the whole immensity of the globe, could be seen from a point near his house.

In his isolation, however, his active mind tended to become more and more possessed by certain ideas, with which everything he read and heard was brought into relation. While still at Florence he had (possibly under the influence of Mrs. Browning) become greatly interested in the teachings of Swedenborg and the phenomena of spiritualism which seemed to him a natural development of Swedenborg’s theories. At first he was apt to speak rather lightly of spirit revelations. In 1852 he wrote to Alfred:

It was not long before he became a complete convert to Swedenborgianism and firmly convinced of the reality of the Spiritualistic phenomena with which the press and literature of the day began to be flooded. Indeed at[Pg 46] one time he believed that spirits communicated with himself by a kind of electrical ticking, which he was constantly hearing in his room at night, and used at their dictation to do a certain amount of automatic writing. The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that he was forced to conclude the spirits to be of an evil and untrustworthy nature, and he therefore abandoned the practice of spiritualism altogether. He remained, however, convinced of the fact that living men were able to communicate with the spirits of the departed, who had been able, since the end (in 1757) of the second dispensation (according to Swedenborg) and the abolition of the intermediate state of purgatory which accompanied it, to establish direct intercourse with our world, and he believed that this rapid increase of communication was a sign of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, of the total abolition of all barriers between the material and spiritual worlds, and the actual physical regeneration of man in the Millennium predicted by Christ and the prophets. The natural and political tumults of which the nineteenth century was so prolific seemed to him to point in the same direction, and to fall in with the prophecy of Daniel which he was never tired of quoting.

Frederick abandoned these views at the end of his life, but it is not difficult to see how they came to acquire such a hold on him. He was essentially a mystic and clung most fervently to the belief in a future life, where all good things should be taken up into the spiritual life and glorified.

His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the “frowzy diatribes of black men with white ties—too often the only white thing about them” (one can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the “little papacies” that dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape his wrath.

Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even greater bitterness, as the following letter shows:

And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should have come to regard the phenomena of spiritualism as the strongest evidence of those beliefs which were to him more important than life itself, and, this conviction once established, submission to the strange genius of Swedenborg followed almost as a matter of course, for by his “science of correspondencies,” the new phenomena seemed to fall naturally and inevitably into their proper place in that strange dual scheme of spirit and matter into which Swedenborg had resolved the Universe. When he had once embarked upon Occultism, other curious beliefs followed in the train of these main convictions. He became greatly impressed with the work of a certain Mr. Melville who believed that he[Pg 49] had rediscovered an ancient and long forgotten method of reading the stars which was in fact the original mystery of Freemasonry. Frederick took eagerly to this idea which seemed to fall naturally into place with the Swedenborgian science of correspondencies, and in 1872 he actually came to England with Mr. Melville in the hope of being able to convince the Freemasons that all modern Masonry with its boasted mysteries was futile and meaningless without the key of Mr. Melville’s discovery in which lay the true explanation of all the masonic signs and symbols. Unfortunately an interview with the Duke of Leinster, the then Grand Master, gave the two apostles little satisfaction. It was on this visit that Frederick saw FitzGerald for the last time, and the latter described him to Mrs. Kemble as being “quite grand and sincere in this as in all else; with the Faith of a gigantic child—pathetic and yet humorous to consider and consort with.”

The influence of these ideas gradually coloured Frederick’s view on all current subjects. His years in Florence had been spent in the “hubbub of imminent war,” and he writes indignantly of “the rottenness of these pitiable petty States and the incredible fantastic tricks of their abominable rulers.” None the less, though he hated and despised most existing monarchies, he was too much imbued with the romance and dignity of the past to look with a very favourable eye on revolution. At first he dismissed Mazzini as “deserving a hempen collar with Nana Sahib and the King of Delhi,” an opinion which the experience of later years compelled him to reverse. The story of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to him chaos, but it was the chaos which was to precede the new spiritual dispensation, and political prejudice never hindered him from the true appreciation of progress. Thus he writes in 1869:

France he always hated as the leader of materialism, and he would repeat with a snort of disgust the remark of M. Bert, who, during the debate in the Chamber on the secularization of Education, observed that it was superfluous to exclude what did not exist. The debacle of 1870 seemed a just if tragic retribution.

As might be expected, he tended to Conservatism in politics; Home Rule was anathema, and Disraeli,[Pg 51] endeared to him as the possible leader of a United Israel, he regarded as a sincerer statesman than Gladstone. None the less he was able to applaud Gladstone’s action on the occasion of the Bulgarian atrocities, though “even he” seemed to have yielded so much

None the less he hated a bigoted Toryism, and thought that “a proper democratic spirit which aims at a reconstruction of society on the principle of ‘each for all and all for each,’ the correlation of privileges and duties, worth and honour, wealth and charity (in its best sense), the substitution of altruism for egoism, ought to find its echo in every loyal heart—and would in fact be the very ‘end of Sin, and bringing in of the Everlasting Righteousness’ foretold.”

In literature, too, his mind—in spite of an occasional failure to recognize individual genius—was remarkably alive to the progressive movements of the day. Indeed, for a man so steeped in classicism, his freedom from prejudice was remarkable. Browning’s poetry, however, in spite of his affection for the author, he could never appreciate. He wrote to Mrs. Brotherton:

Nevertheless, it was always the future of Art, not its past, which stirred his interest, and a letter of his written in 1885, when he was seventy-eight, shows a youth and vitality of mind truly remarkable in one whose life had been so cloistered.

It may be that the very remoteness of his life was in part the cause of this lasting freshness and freedom of his mind. He lived so far from the world as to be almost entirely removed from any bias of self-interest—the most fruitful source of prejudice. Ambition played no part in his life.

The death of his wife in 1880 was a severe blow to him.

A great but less tremendous shock to him was the death in 1887 of his sister Emily, once the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. On this occasion he sent the following lines to his friend:

Farewell, dear sister, thou and I
Will meet no more beneath the sky:
But in the high world where thou art
Mind speaks to Mind, and Heart to Heart,
[Pg 55]Not in faint wavering tones, but heard
As twin sweet notes that sound accord.
Thy dwelling in the Angel sphere
Looks forth on a sublimer whole,
Where all that thou dost see and hear
Is in true concord with thy soul—
A great harp of unnumbered strings
Answering to one voice that sings:
Where thousand blisses spring and fade
Swiftly, as in diviner dream,
And inward motions are portrayed
In outward shows that move with them:
After the midnight and dark river
No more to be o’erpast for ever.
Behold the lover of thy youth,
That spirit strong as Love and Truth,
Many a long year gone before,
Awaits thee on the sunny shore:
In that high world of endless wonder
Nor Space, nor Time can hold asunder
Twin souls—as Space and Time have done—
Whom kindest instincts orb in One.

It was inevitable that the later years of one so aged and so solitary should be more and more filled with the chronicle and anticipation of death. But he never sank into lethargy, as the following letter, written in his eighty-first year, shows:

Even when in his eighty-fourth year his sight began to fail him and the loss drove him still more back into his inner life, the old eagerness of mind remained, though[Pg 56] finding a melancholy occupation in noting the changes to which age was daily subjecting his mental and physical constitution. The note of hope is, however, ineradicable:

[Pg 57]With the approach of death he seemed to himself to undergo a kind of physical regeneration.

As age settled upon him the violence of many of his views abated. His faith in Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism lost their hold on him and gave way to a more philosophic condition of mind. His activity, however, continued unabated. In 1890, after a silence of thirty-six years, he published his Isles of Greece, and the success of the volume encouraged him to give to the world two others, Daphne and other Poems in 1891, and Poems of the Day and Year (in which were included some of the verses contained in the volume of 1854) in 1898. In 1896 he left Jersey to join his eldest son, Captain Julius Tennyson, in whose house in Kensington he died on February 26, 1898.

It would be difficult to imagine two persons more strongly contrasted in life and character than Frederick and Charles. Charles (who was always Alfred’s favourite brother) had nothing of the powerful, erratic, tempestuous mind of his elder brother. One does not think of him, as FitzGerald did of Frederick, as a being born for the warmth and glow of the South, yet in appearance he was (like Alfred) far more Southern than the eldest brother. So Spanish were his swarthy complexion, brown eyes, and curly, dark hair, that Thackeray, meeting him in middle age, called him a “Velasquez tout craché.” Like Alfred, too, he had a magnificent deep bass voice; and even in dress the two brothers seem to have maintained their affinity, for Charles used to wear a soft felt hat and flowing black cloak much like those which the Millais portrait has identified with his brother, and these garments, with the addition of white cuffs, which he wore turned back over his coat sleeves, intensified the strangely foreign effect of his appearance. But the kinship of the [Pg 59]two brothers extended beyond purely physical resemblance. They remained inseparable companions till Charles was ordained, and there was hardly a taste possessed by either which the other did not share. They read, played, and rambled together; both were extremely fond of dancing (one of Charles’s last Sonnets was “On a County Ball”) and were much sought after as partners at the balls of their countryside. The Poems by Two Brothers, which were almost entirely the work of Alfred and Charles, while displaying the differing qualities of each, were a joint production, the fruit of common reading and common enthusiasm. Both the brothers were regarded by their contemporaries at Cambridge as destined to achieve poetical greatness. Both possessed the unwearying patience of the craftsman, the same devotion to science and the same power of close and loving observation. Charles, however, lacked the fire and energy of temperament which made Frederick’s character remarkable and was to a great extent shared by Alfred. With all Alfred’s sensitiveness and shrinking from society, he had little of that sympathetic and passionate interest in the hopes and achievements of their age which drove the younger brother ever more and more into public life.

Charles Tennyson-Turner.

Nothing quieter and less eventful than Charles Tennyson’s life can well be imagined. He was ordained in 1835 (three years after taking his degree) and immediately obtained a Curacy at Tealby. In the same year he became Vicar of Grasby, a small village in the Lincolnshire wolds between Caistor and Brigg.

In the following year he married Louisa Sellwood, whose sister was to become Alfred’s wife, and from that time until just before his death on April 25, 1879, his life, save for an occasional holiday and too frequent lapses from health, knew little variation. Like all the Tennysons, Charles was of a nervous temperament, and[Pg 60] this condition often induced acute suffering. So severe indeed was his struggle with this disorder and the still more perilous condition which resulted from it that at one time, soon after his marriage, he was compelled to leave his parish for some months in search of strength. Throughout these trying interludes the devotion of his wife, a woman of great humour and power of mind and character, was of the utmost service to him. Indeed, his debt to her was great at all times of his life. She would often act almost as a curate to him in the straggling parish, tirelessly visiting and nursing the sick (a duty which they both unflinchingly observed even in the epidemics of small-pox which were then frequent), keeping all his accounts, both personal and parochial, and even sometimes writing his sermons. The devotion of the pair was remarkable, retaining a certain youthful ardour to the end, and when Charles died his wife was carried to the grave within a month.

As early as 1830, Charles had published a small volume of sonnets, which (as is well known) earned the hearty commendation of Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. As in the case of Frederick, however, there followed a prolonged silence, the next volume not making its appearance till 1864; others followed in 1868 and 1873, and all were collected and republished, with a sage, benevolent, and affectionate Introduction by his friend James Spedding, in 1880. The reason for this long silence was a slightly different one from that which was responsible for Frederick’s intermission. In both cases, no doubt, the feeling that it would be impertinent for another person of the name of Tennyson to put his work before the public had some influence. In Charles’s case, however, there were further considerations. The violent shock which his health sustained by that prolonged early illness and his subsequent troubles to some extent numbed his powers. “The edge of thought was blunted[Pg 61] by the stress of the hard world,” and the same cause probably increased his natural modesty till it became almost morbid. He was perpetually haunted by the fear that his poetry was not original, and the only word of satisfaction which Spedding ever heard him use of any of his sonnets was with regard to one which owed its origin to a period of deep affliction, of which the poet said that he thought it was good because he knew it to be true. Whatever the cause, however, during these thirty-four years Charles Turner published nothing and, indeed, hardly even wrote anything. Spedding, in his Introduction, has collected a few fragments which were gathered from the poet’s notebooks, and show that his mind still occasionally noted a stray simile or description, doubtless intended to be subsequently worked up into a poem. A few of these are in his happiest manner. One may quote the following picture of goldfish in a glass bowl:

As though King Midas did the surface touch,
Constraining the clear water to their change
With shooting motions and quick trails of light.
Now a rich girth and then a narrow gleam,
And now a shaft and now a sheet of gold.

and the lines on the opening of the tomb of Charlemagne:

They rove the marble where the ancient King,
Like one forspent with sacred study sate,
Robed like a King, but as a scholar pale.

His mind, too, was always working in the same direction on his rambles about the countryside, and he would sometimes, when walking with Agnes Weld, “the little, ambling, stile-clearing niece,” who was often his guest, hit on some phrase which took his fancy and was imparted to his companion, who remembers his description of the slanting light-bars on a cloudy day as “the oars of the golden Galley of the sun,” and many another phrase[Pg 62] as happy as any of the homely and perfect touches in his published works.

But though these years were barren of actual output, they were of value in many ways, and not the least as a period of incubation, for many a phrase or idea first formed in them was subsequently perfected and published. The intermission, too, left him freer to study and to labour among his parishioners. At the beginning and end of his life, poetry occupied a great deal of his time, for each of his sonnets, in spite of their apparent facility, was the result of much toil. He would work at the same lines morning after morning, and read the results aloud to his wife, or niece, or other companion after dinner, the same poem going through a great succession of forms. A letter to Miss Weld, in answer to some suggestion of a subject connected with the then recent excavations at Mycenae, shows his method of work and something of the manifold interests of his secluded life:

During these barren years Charles Turner’s devotion to his parochial work was intense. Grasby was a somewhat barbarous village when he obtained the living. Belief in witchcraft was still rife, and one of the popular charms against its influence was to cut a sheep in half, put the body on a scarlet cloth, and walk between the pieces. Such religion as there was among the poor was of a rather harsh spirit, as may be seen from an anecdote preserved by Miss Weld of an old cottager, who, hearing[Pg 63] Mrs. Turner mention the name of Hobbes, exclaimed to his wife: “Why, loovey, that’s the graate Hobbes that’s in hell!” The climate, too, was as harsh as the character of the people, for the village stands high and bleak. Friends remember Louisa Turner going about her ministrations in clogs, and during one particularly sharp winter she writes: “I am in a castle now of double cotton wool petticoat and thick baize drawers and waistcoat.” The Turners soon found it necessary to leave the house at Caistor, three miles off, where Sam Turner, Charles’s uncle, the preceding vicar, had lived, for the distance made any real intimacy with the people impossible. Charles had inherited a small property from his uncle (the event was the occasion of his change of name), and this made it possible for him to build a new vicarage and to further enrich the village with new schools and a new church. He also took the very practical step of buying the village inn and putting it in charge of a reliable servant, a scheme which, for a time at least, had excellent effects on the temperance of the inhabitants.

There were no children of the marriage, but the pair adopted the children of the whole village, opening their house and grounds to them for Christmas trees and summer festivities. Children and animals were always devoted to Charles Turner, as he to them. He was, as the villagers said, “Strangen gone upon birds and things.” He never shot after that tragedy of the swallow which he never forgot (see Sonnet 200), and birds of every kind flocked to him daily as he fed them on his lawn. Flowers and trees, too, he loved almost as keenly as he did children. He quarrelled seriously with one of his curates whom he found exorcising the flowers, which were to be used for church decoration, by means of the service contained in the Directorium Anglicanum, maintaining stoutly that if any spirits dwelt[Pg 64] in flowers they must be angels and not devils. His garden was a jungle of old-fashioned flowers, golden-rod, sweet-william, convolvulus, and rose of Sharon; figs and apricots ripened on his walls, and the house was covered with roses, honeysuckle, white clematis, and blue ceanothus. The grounds, too, boasted some fine timber, which Charles never would allow to be pruned or cut, even permitting the willow-props to outgrow and destroy the rose trees (Sonnet 270), and once, when it was proposed to fell some large trees within sight of his house, he threatened to throw up his living and leave Grasby.

In this peaceful world Charles found plenty to occupy his time. He saw little of society except when Alfred or Frederick, or one of his old college friends, came to visit him, and the resources of the neighbourhood were strained to the utmost to afford them entertainment. He found, however, a congenial companion in Mr. Townsend, a neighbouring clergyman of wide culture much interested in science. And the care of his parish occupied the greater part of his time. Theology, too, was a favourite study with him. He began life as an Evangelical, but in later years tended (partly under the influence of his wife, who would often, on the vigil of a saint, spend half the night on her knees) more and more towards the High Church.

He and his wife also spent much time in the study of Italian, in which they were assisted by their occasional visits to and from the Frederick Tennysons. Charles’s Italian Grammar is annotated with numberless quaint rhymes made to fix its rules in his memory. On one page one finds in his wonderfully neat fluent hand (strangely like those of Frederick and Alfred):

From use of the following is no ban,
“The fair of the fair is Mistress Ann”
or “Smith’s a learned, learned man”
In English or Italian,
Though the English use is far less common
Speaking of Doctor or fine woman.

On another:

Say profeta, profeti
Or else I shall bate ye.

On another a couplet which has all the subtle romance of Edward Lear:

Rare and changeless, firm and few,
Are the Italian nouns in U.

The life at Grasby Vicarage was of the simplest. The hall-floor rattled with loose tiles, the furniture was reduced to the barest necessities. Breakfast and lunch were movable feasts, for Charles had all a poet’s carelessness of time, lingering over morning prayers while his agonized guest saw the bacon cooling to the consistency of marble before his eyes, and prolonging his mid-day walk to such distances in the study of flower and bird and butterfly that it sometimes took a half-hour’s tolling of the outdoor bell to recall him.[Pg 66] The cook (who in times of scarcity was at the service of the whole village) must have led a life of irritation, yet servants stayed long at the Vicarage.

This sweet, even life knew little variety. The days of quiet service filled the year, and were succeeded by evenings no less quiet in the book-lined study, or, if the season were warm, in the hayfield near the house, where husband and wife would sit reading and talking to each other till the evening glow died away and left the haycocks and the steep side of the wold, which backed the red-brick Vicarage, gray and cold and silent.

Troubles they had beyond the recurrent anxiety for Charles’s health. A rascally agent, a man of great plausibility and charm of manner, pillaged them for some years, and they were only able to recover a portion of his plunderings (most of which Charles subsequently devoted to the repair of the church) after a great deal of trouble. It is characteristic that in after years they always spoke of this gentleman as though he had been the person who had suffered most in the transaction and deserved most pity. Charles was indeed possessed of an almost saintly patience, and no crisis could ever wring from him any ejaculation more forcible than a half-humorous “I wish we were all in heaven.” His wife’s letters occasionally give us glimpses of days when the wish must often have been upon his lips, as when he was reluctantly compelled to join in a Harvest-Festival gathering in another parish. First of all we read how “poor Cubbie” (his wife’s pet name for him) “was caught and dressed in a surplice which hung about him like a clothes bag.” “Then he must join in a procession, with much singing and chanting, and then read the lessons in spite of a bad cold and hoarseness, and finally at the end of the day, in the full hubbub of a garden party, at which all the neighbourhood were present in their finery (poor Cubbie!), a cannon, which had been[Pg 67] charged with blank cartridge for the occasion, went off unexpectedly and knocked down three boys who were standing in front of it. The boys, whose clothes were torn to rags and their faces burnt black, shrieked as though in the death agony, women fainted and men stampeded—and Cubbie ‘wished we were all in heaven.’”

But Charles Turner’s poems are, after all, the best mirror of his life. With Frederick it is otherwise. In spite of his great lyric gift, Frederick lacked the persistence and enthusiasm necessary for full self-expression. The want of proportion, which gave his ardent, erratic personality so much charm, prevented his longer poems being really successful. In spite of much beauty of phrase and richness of feeling, they lack architecture and have not sufficient unity to make them vital. Had he continued to work at lyrical writing after his first volume, he might have avoided falling into the desultory method, which marred his later work, and left a really large body of first-class poetry.

In the best of Charles’s Sonnets, in all, that is, which spring from his daily experience, there breathes a spirit perpetually quickened by the beauty and holiness of common life and common things, an imagination which saw a life and a purpose not only in the ways of men and of all wild creatures and growing things, but in the half-human voice of the buoy-bell ringing on the shoals, the sad imprisoned heart-beat of the water-ram in the little wood-girt field, the welcome of the sunbeam in the copse running through the yielding shade to meet the wanderer, in the “mystic stair” of the steam thrashing-machine:

Accepting our full harvests like a God
With clouds about his shoulders.

and the “mute claim” of the old rocking-horse:

In the dim window where disused, he stands
While o’er him breaks the flickering limewalks’ shade;
[Pg 68]No provender, no mate, no groom has he—
His stall and pasture is your memory.[14]

But in spite of the intimate correspondence between Charles Turner’s life and his art, an intimacy which only the seclusion of that life made possible, one cannot help regretting that fortune did not force upon him some calling which would have afforded a progressive stimulus to his creative powers. These years of devotion amongst the bleak hill-sides and flowery dingles of his remote parish did for him what a life of ease and sunshine did for Frederick. Both had great talents, but neither the tender felicity of Charles nor Frederick’s heart of cloud and fire ever came to full development. They represent two extremes of the Tennyson temperament, the mean and perfection of which is found in Alfred. In the elder the lyric fury, in the younger the craftsman’s humility of the more perfect poet were developed to excess, and both suffered for the affection and respect in which they held him whom they knew to be their master. Yet each has left himself a monument, some part at least of which is worthy to rank with the more complete achievement of their younger brother.

[Pg 69]

[Pg 70] 

A. H. H.
Obiit 1833.

[Pg 71]

ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM

TO JAMES SPEDDING

ON THE DEATH OF HIS BROTHER

TO EDWARD FITZGERALD

(Dedication of “Tiresias,” written in 1882)

EPILOGUE AT END OF “TIRESIAS”

TO JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE

TO J. W. BLAKESLEY

AFTERWARDS DEAN OF LINCOLN

TO R. C. TRENCH

AFTERWARDS ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN

(Dedication of “The Palace of Art”)

TO THE REV. W. H. BROOKFIELD

[Pg 81]

TO EDMUND LUSHINGTON

ON HIS MARRIAGE WITH CECILIA TENNYSON

 [Pg 86]

CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER

Midnight, June 30, 1879

[Pg 88]

Edmund Lushington
(Who married Cecilia Tennyson, and was
Professor of Greek in the University of Glasgow).

[Pg 89]

By Sir Henry Craik, K.C.B., M.P.

Amongst the group of men attached to Lord Tennyson by bonds of early and life-long friendship, and of reverent affection, there is none in whose case the tie is surrounded with more of peculiar interest than Edmund Lushington. Those who in later years were privileged to know the Poet’s brother-in-law, and learned to appreciate his character, could well understand the closeness of the sympathy between them.

Edmund Law Lushington was the son of Edmund Henry Lushington, who at one time held important office in Ceylon. The eldest of four[15] gifted brothers, Edmund was born on the 10th of January 1811. The family house was, at first, at Hanwell, from which, some years later, they moved to Park House, near Maidstone. That continued to be the home to which Edmund Lushington returned at every break in his work at Glasgow, and was his permanent residence from his retirement in 1875 until his death on the 13th of July 1893. Young Lushington went to Charterhouse School, and there—as afterwards for a time at Trinity—he had Thackeray as his contemporary. To the friendship thus early begun Thackeray, in long after years, paid a gracious tribute in The Virginians, where he cites the Professor at Glasgow and one at Cambridge (W. H. Thompson) as scholars who could more than hold their own against the great names of older days.

[Pg 90]As his junior at Trinity, Lushington had at first no acquaintance with Tennyson, and he has himself told us how he first came to know him by sight, when Arthur Hallam declaimed his prize essay in the College Chapel, and Tennyson sat on the bench just below listening intently to the words of his friend. Already Tennyson’s name was well known in the University; many of his poems were handed about in manuscript, and the rank to which they were entitled was a topic of discussion in College societies. It was only after two years at Cambridge that Lushington’s friendship with Tennyson began, and as joint members of the “Apostles’” Society they were thrown into close intercourse. In 1832 Lushington was Senior Classic in a notable list, which contained also the names of Shilleto, the famous coach; Alford, afterwards Dean of Canterbury and Biblical commentator; and William Hepworth Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity. Six years later, in 1838, he was chosen as Professor of Greek in Glasgow from a field which comprised competitors so notable as Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, and Archibald Campbell Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. As bearing on this we may quote—as a specimen of his quaint and kindly humour—a letter which Lushington wrote to Tennyson from Addington Park, where he was staying on a visit to the Archbishop on October 13, 1880:

This appointment, which banished young Lushington[Pg 91] from all the scenes of his early days, did not break the friendship with Tennyson, which had quickly ripened into closest intimacy. In 1840 Tennyson came to visit at Park House,—still Lushington’s home during the long summer vacation,—and in 1842 he was present at that festival of the Maidstone Institute which is described in the opening verses of “The Princess.” The same summer saw the bond drawn tighter by the marriage of Lushington to the Poet’s youngest and best-loved sister, Cecilia. It is that marriage which is acclaimed in immortal words in the Epilogue to “In Memoriam,” and the tribute there paid to the bridegroom is one which comes home to all who knew him, as a faithful epitome of his personality:

And thou art worthy; full of power;
As gentle, liberal-minded, great,
Consistent; wearing all that weight
Of learning lightly like a flower.

The marriage became one link more in that enduring friendship. Those who knew Mrs. Lushington in later years—when jet-black hair and brilliant clearness of complexion were still marvellously preserved—can easily picture her earlier beauty, which must have had much of that “profile like that on a coin”—which, we are told, was characteristic of Emily, the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. Mrs. Lushington had a fine contralto voice, with something of the music that one felt in the Poet’s rich tones.[16] She was a charming and even a brilliant companion, and, when in good health, enjoyed society. But Glasgow College—as it was then generally called, amidst the murky surroundings of its old site, close to the reeking slums of the New Vennel—was an abode little fitted for one accustomed to warmer suns and more congenial scenes. Mrs. Lushington’s health was grievously broken, and the[Pg 92] northern chills and fogs told heavily on her spirits. She could rarely join her husband at Glasgow, and it became necessary for him, during the session which lasted through the six winter months, to take a house in Edinburgh and rejoin his wife only for week-ends. Attached as Lushington was to his home and his family, the burden of ill-health that lay heavily on his household was a grievous one. It caused him much anxiety. Long pain often racked the nerves and dulled the bright spirit of his wife; his only son died after a long and painful illness, and took the light from his life; a daughter followed that son to the grave; and his brother Henry,[17] whose brilliant poetic gifts had been fully proved in the volume of poems entitled Points of War, which he wrote in conjunction with his brother Franklin, died at Paris in the fulness of his powers. He learned, as he writes in one of his letters to Tennyson, that “the roots of love and sorrow are verily twined together abysmally deep.” But never once, in all his letters, or in any of his views of his fellow-men, did grief or sorrow drive him into bitterness or cynicism, or make him bate a jot of his calm and reverent fortitude or of his deep and generous charity to his fellow-men.

Throughout that long life, sustained by great thoughts, enriched by wide and varied learning, and blessed by ties of closest affection, Lushington preserved consistently the ideals of the early days, and remained to the last the same strong yet gentle friend, at once generous in admiration and judicial in criticism, that he had been when Tennyson drew his portrait in those immortal lines. We know what were the interests and tastes of these early days. Dean Bradley, in his reminiscences of visits to Park House in 1841 and 1842, tells us how the brothers, and especially the [Pg 93]Professor—“Uncle Edmund”—seemed as much at home in the language of the Greek dramatists as if it was their native tongue; and the present writer remembers how, fifty years later, he heard Lord Tennyson recall the quotation from the Ecclesiazousae, by which one or other of the brothers, on an occasion at Park House which must have been almost contemporaneous with the Dean’s reminiscences, marked the propensity of the ladies of the party to assiduous attendance at Church. Dean Bradley remarks how remote was their outlook on the world from that of the Oxford of his time, dominated by the Tractarian movement. Tolerance, breadth of view, balanced judgment, and deep reverence for all that was noblest in human thought and achievement—these gave the keynote to their minds and energies. Partisanship, sectarian controversy, ecclesiastical disputes, seemed to belong to an alien world.

To those who knew him as Professor at Glasgow the secret of Lushington’s influence was not far to seek. He came there into surroundings singularly unlike those of his earlier days, and with little to compensate in their grimy aspect for the beauty of his home and the hallowed associations of Trinity. It was not long before he had attuned himself to the scene of his new work, and gathered about him a circle of cherished friends, and had won the respect and regard of the great body of these Scottish students drawn from every class. For those who were touched by his enthusiastic love of the Greek language and its literature, his influence was something far deeper. He made no stirring appeals, and followed no startling methods. His perfect courtesy, combined with a firmness which needed no emphasis of manner to assert itself, sufficed to maintain absolute order amongst those large classes whose traditions made them not always amenable to discipline. But for those to whom his teaching was something of an inspiration, there was[Pg 94] much more in his personality than this. Consummate dignity, combined with absolute simplicity of manner, a voice rich and melodious in tone, a diction graceful and harmonious but never studied or artificial—these, with a massive head and features of almost ideal beauty, made him a figure in the life of the College, deepened the impression of his calm and reverent enthusiasm for all that was noblest in thought and language, and gave to his influence an abiding force throughout the lifetime of his pupils. He offered no ready intimacy, and sought to form no following. But his words, few and well chosen, made themselves felt as pure gold, and a sentence of praise or of sympathy sank into the heart, and brought to life and work something that stirred reverence and enthusiasm. His work planted its root deeply, and sought for no outward recognition. It was only after his long career at Glasgow ended by his retirement in 1875 that what he had achieved in reviving an ideal of Greek scholarship was felt; and it was abiding enough to make him the choice of the students for an honour, rarely accorded to a former Professor—that of election as Lord Rector of the University in 1884. He pursued the even tenor of his way with no thought of self-aggrandizement; only slowly did that absolute modesty, linked with unassailable dignity, make itself felt as a power, radiating into the hearts of others his own illuminating enthusiasm for the ideals of noblest literature.

No poet could have had, bound to him by ties of closest affection, a critic more sympathetic, more reverent, and withal, more faithful in his appreciation. In the genius of Tennyson, he found the central joy and pride of his life; but his judgment was the more valuable, in that it was at all times absolutely sincere:

One reference to a hint of criticism in a letter of June 1857, after the publication of the early Idylls “Enid” and “Nimue (Vivien)” is not without interest. Lushington writes to Tennyson:

The Idylls always had a peculiar interest for Lushington, and he had long encouraged their production. “I am beyond measure delighted,” he writes in 1856, “to hear of Merlin and his compeers”; and again in the same year, and in his deepest pangs of anxiety about his boy, he does not forget the wish, “All genial inspiration from home breezes come to ‘Enid.’” “Is anything of the Arthurian plan getting into shape?” he writes again in 1859. He was fervent in his admiration of the Dedication to Prince Albert of the new edition of the Idylls in 1862: “Its truth and loftiness and tenderness will be felt in a hundred years as much as now.” “Anything of our own Arthur?” he writes again in 1866, “That’s the true subject.”

His letters (published and unpublished) to Tennyson convey not only the picture of a circle knit by warmest affection, but estimates of others always generous, and sometimes warm with enthusiastic admiration. Carlyle[Pg 96] he met at Edinburgh in 1866, and was “struck with the beauty and sweetness of his face; through all its grimness ... there seems to be an infinite freshness of spirit with infinite sadness. His laugh is exactly like a boy’s.” In 1856 he writes: “Have you seen Browning’s new volumes? I have been trying to construe them, and no gold had ever to be digged out through more stubborn rocks. But he is a poet as well as good fellow.”

Through all these long years, with their vicissitudes of joy and sorrow, their long partings, and amid varied and widely separate occupations, the friendship remained as fresh as in the early days, an association of common delight in all that was noblest in literature, inspired by a bond of deepest poetic sympathy. To those who knew and venerated Lushington, it might seem that his deep and abiding reverence for the genius of one knit to him, as Tennyson was, by more than a brother’s love, had in it something which inspired him in his work, and came in place of all thought of personal ambition. His learning enriched his life, and gave to his work as teacher its perfection and its illumination; but it never prompted him to publication, and he gave nothing to the press under his own name except his opening address as professor, his address to the students as Lord Rector, and a short Life of his friend Professor Ferrier, whose posthumous works he edited. In the one friendship he found the chief solace of his life. In the last letter addressed to Tennyson on the anniversary of his birthday, August 6, 1892—only three months before the Poet’s death—Lushington wrote:

No better picture of the friendship could be given than that enshrined in these words. Lushington survived Tennyson less than a year.

[Pg 98]

By Dr. Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and now Professor of Poetry

Alfred Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald; In Memoriam and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; “The Eternal Yea” and “The Eternal No,” “the larger hope” and “the desperate sort of thing unfortunately at the bottom of all thinking men’s minds, made Music [Pg 99]of”—few friendships, few conjunctions, personal or literary, could be more interesting or more piquant.

What adds to the interest of the friendship is that it remained so long unknown to the literary or the general world, and is even now, perhaps, only partially appreciated. Yet it subsisted for nearly fifty years. It was close and constant. Though, as time went on, the two friends met less and less often, it was maintained by a steady interchange of letters and messages. The letters were naturally more on FitzGerald’s side. Like most, though not perhaps quite all good letter-writers, FitzGerald was a great letter-writer. He was, as he often said, an idle man, and as he also said, he rather liked writing letters, “unlike most Englishmen (but I am Irish),” he added. Indeed, he seemed almost to prefer communication with his friends by letter to personal meetings, though these he enjoyed greatly when brought to the point.

Tennyson and FitzGerald were old friends, born in the same year, the notable year 1809. It is true that though they were at Cambridge together they were not then known to each other, except by sight. “I remember him there well,” said FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson, “a sort of Hyperion.” They had many friendships, acquaintances, associations in common. Carlyle, Thackeray, Spedding, Merivale, Trench, W. H. Thompson, J. D. Allen, W. B. Donne, Brookfield, Cowell, Mrs. Kemble, Samuel Laurence, were known to them both. In their formative years they fell under the same influences, and read many of the same books. It was about 1835 that they became acquainted. They were brought together probably by their common and uncommon friend, James Spedding. They certainly met at his father’s house, Mirehouse, near Bassenthwaite Lake, in the spring of 1835.

Tennyson had begun writing “In Memoriam” a little[Pg 100] before this, i.e. early in 1834, soon after his friend Hallam’s sudden death and sad home-bringing in the winter of 1833. He kept it on the stocks, as all know, for some seventeen years. It was published, at first anonymously, in 1850. The secret of its authorship was soon revealed, the poem found immediate acceptance and popularity. It became and has remained one of the most widely read poems in the language. In the meantime Tennyson, though not so famous as “In Memoriam” made him, had become well known through the 1842 volumes.

FitzGerald, on the contrary, was at that time quite unknown, except by his friendships, and to his friends. An Irishman, with the easygoing and dolce far niente qualities which so often temper the brilliant genius of that race, sufficiently provided with means, he was naturally inclined for a quiet and easy, not to say indolent life. He deliberately chose from the first the fallentis semita vitae. He had some literary ambitions, and he wrote a few early poems, one or two of rare promise and beauty. One gift in particular was his—not, it is true, always leading him to action, yet in its passive or dynamic form constant and abundant almost to excess—loyalty in friendship. Once and fatally, it led him to take or submit to a positive step. He had been the attached friend of Bernard Barton the Quaker poet, the friend of Charles Lamb. When Barton died, from a mistaken sense of duty, FitzGerald not only collected his poems, a task more pious than profitable, but afterward, having meanwhile hesitated and halted too long in offering himself to one who was his real love, married his daughter who was not this. He left her, not indeed as is sometimes said, on the morrow of the wedding, but after separations and repeated attempts—in town and country—at reunion, and lived, as he had done before, alone and somewhat drearily ever afterwards.

Speculation has busied itself about his unfortunate[Pg 101] marriage. The briefest but also the best pronouncement is probably his own letter written at the time to Mrs. Tennyson:

The old life to which he returned was monotonous, recluse, unconventional. He spent most of his days in East Anglia, an unromantic region, yet not unbeautiful or wanting a charm of its own; in summer emerging into the sunshine, sitting on a chair in his garden as Tennyson’s poem paints him, or on another chair on the deck of his boat, coasting the shores, or sailing up and down the creeks and estuaries with which that country abounds; in winter crouching over the fire, and in either chair smoking and endlessly reading.

In the earlier part of his life he moved about from one home to another, though never very far. In 1860 he settled down at Woodbridge in Suffolk, a pleasant, old-fashioned, provincial town, a sort of East Anglian Totnes, where the Deben, like the more famous Dart, seems to issue from a doorway of close-guarding hills to meet the salt tide, and begins the last stage of its cheerful journey to the open sea.

Just before this, in January of 1859, FitzGerald printed a small edition of a translation of a poem by a Persian astronomer, who died about 1123 A.D. The whole production of this famous piece seemed almost an accident. FitzGerald had been introduced, some half-dozen years earlier, to the study of Persian by[Pg 102] his friend Mr. E. B. Cowell, a brother East Anglian, then in business in Ipswich. Cowell, wishing to pursue his studies further and take a Degree, went in 1851 as a married and somewhat mature student to Oxford, and there, in the Bodleian Library, came on a rare MS. of the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.” It is a beautiful little volume, written upon parchment sprinkled with gold dust, in a fine black ink, with blue headings, gold divisions, and delicate Oriental illuminations in blue, gold, and green, at the beginning and the end, and is the earliest known MS. of the poem, dating from 1450 A.D. Of this he made a copy for FitzGerald, who kept it by him, and gradually produced a translation, if not rather a paraphrase. “I also amuse myself,” he wrote in December 1853, “with poking out some Persian which E. Cowell would inaugurate me with. I go on with it because it is a point in common with him and enables me to study a little together.”

In 1858 he had got his version into a shape somewhat to his mind, and sent it to Fraser’s Magazine. It was kept for about a year, when FitzGerald asked for it back, and had 250 copies printed early in 1859. He gave away a few and sent the rest to Quaritch.

What ensued is one of the curiosities of literature. FitzGerald did not expect any success or vogue for the work. True, he had toiled at it. “Very few People,” he said, “have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have; though certainly not to be literal.” And when he had finished he liked “to make an end of the matter by print.” But that was all. “I hardly know,” he added, “why I print any of these things which nobody buys.”

Quaritch, as FitzGerald expected, found no sale for Omar. He reduced the price from five shillings to one shilling, and then to one penny. Rossetti heard of it through Whitley Stokes, and showed it to Swinburne. They were attracted by it and bought sixpenny-worth.[Pg 103] Quaritch raised his price to twopence. They carried off a few more, and the rest, a little later, were eagerly bought up at a guinea or more apiece. Yet the poem remained long known to very few. Quaritch published a second edition, again a small one, nine years later in 1868, and four years later still, a third small edition in 1872, and in 1879 a fourth edition, including Salámán and Absál. The third edition came out just about the time I was going to Oxford as an undergraduate, and it was then that I first heard of it through J. A. Symonds and H. G. Dakyns, who gave me in 1874 a copy which Symonds had presented to him, and which I still possess. Even at Oxford I found only a few, either graduates or undergraduates, who heeded it or knew anything about it. Professor Henry Smith was the only senior I can remember who spoke to me about it, telling me of the previous editions, and praising its merits one day as we turned it over together in Parker’s shop. But stealthily and underground it made its way. Edition followed edition, with increasing rapidity. Suddenly it became ubiquitously popular, and it is now certainly one of the best-known pieces of the kind in the language. Messrs. Macmillan put it, in 1899, after a dozen times reprinting it, into their Golden Treasury Series. They had to reprint three times in that year, and this edition has been in constant demand. But there are ever so many others. The poem has been reproduced in a hundred forms, both in England and America, illustrated, illuminated, decorated, annotated. A reprint of the first edition is once more sold for a penny. It has been translated into Latin verse. There is a Concordance to it. A whole literature has sprung up around it. An “Omar Khayyam Club” was founded in 1892. Pious pilgrimages have been made to the translator’s tomb, and Omar’s roses planted over it, and verses recited in celebration of both poet and poem.

[Pg 104]Of all this immense vogue and success, as his letters show, FitzGerald himself never dreamed. Even when in 1885 Tennyson published, as the dedication of Tiresias and other Poems, the lines “To E. FitzGerald,” the translator of Omar was still, for most readers, “a veiled prophet.” To-day, when the poem has become one of the utterances of the century, lovers of paradox have even ventured to hint that instead of FitzGerald being known as the friend of Tennyson, Tennyson might be known hereafter as the friend of FitzGerald.

FitzGerald is certainly known on his own account. The publication of his letters by his loyal old friend, Dr. Aldis Wright, revealed the man himself to the world. The publication of Tennyson’s Life by his son aided the process. Every one will remember the part which FitzGerald plays there, beginning with the meeting at James Spedding’s house in the Lakes in 1835, his early enthusiastic admiration, when he fell in love both with the man and his poems, and then his ever-constant friendship, tempered by grumbling, and what appears sometimes almost grudging criticism. He became the friend, it must be remembered, not only of Alfred, but of the whole family, and especially of Frederick, the eldest brother. “All the Tennysons are to be wished well,” he says in a letter of 1845. Though he affected to think little of society and hated snobbery as much as Tennyson or his other friend Thackeray himself, he greatly admired the better qualities of the English gentry, and had even a kindly weakness for their foibles. When Frederick went to live in Italy he wrote: “I love that such men as Frederick should be abroad: so strong, haughty, and passionate.”

When FitzGerald first met Alfred, the poetic family was still living on at Somersby after their father’s death. He went there and fell in love with their mother, and with their mode of life, and with the region, where[Pg 105] “there were not only such good seas, but such fine Hill and Dale among the Wolds as people in general scarce thought on.” It was characteristic of him that he used to say that Alfred should never have left Lincolnshire.

FitzGerald kept up the friendship mainly, as he did most of his friendships, by letter. In particular, he made a point of writing to the Alfred Tennysons twice a year, once in the summer and again about Christmas time. He addressed himself sometimes to the Poet himself, sometimes to Mrs. Tennyson, and in later days to their eldest son. To Frederick Tennyson, who went to live in Italy, as the readers of Dr. Aldis Wright’s volume will remember, he wrote a whole series of letters, many of them very long and full. Of all these letters—to his father, his mother, himself, and his uncle—the present Lord Tennyson has placed a collection in my hands for the purpose of this article. The story of the friendship which it is an attempt to sketch will best be told by pretty full quotations from them. Many of them, and indeed most of those to his father and mother, are now published for the first time.

FitzGerald did not always succeed, and indeed did not expect to succeed, in drawing a reply from Tennyson himself. In a letter written in the summer of 1860 to Mrs. Tennyson he makes a very amusing reference to this, and also throws some light on his own habits:

[Pg 106]Their relations were always of this playful, intimate kind, resting on long acquaintance. If FitzGerald was amused by “Alfred,” Tennyson, on the other hand, was well used to his old friend’s humour. When we spoke about him, he dwelt, I recollect, on this particular trait, and told me, to illustrate it, the story which is now, I think, pretty well known, how, when some common acquaintance had bored them with talking about his titled friends, “Old Fitz,” as at last he took up his candle to go to bed, turned to Tennyson and said, quietly and quaintly, “I knew a Lord once, but he’s dead.”

When Tennyson spoke of Omar he said, what he has said in verse, that he admired it greatly:

Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun
Which cast it.

But of course he was aware that it was by no means always faithful to the original. It is indeed a liberal, rather than a literal translation—how liberal, all know who have been at the pains to compare FitzGerald’s poem with any of the many literal versions to which it has given rise.

In quite the early Twickenham days, just after their marriage, he would invite himself to dine or stay with Tennyson and his wife, nay more, would ask to bring friends to see them, such as the Cowells and W. B. Donne. In 1854 he stayed at Farringford for a fortnight, a visit he always remembered, and often referred to, with pleasure. Together he and Tennyson worked at Persian. He also sketched, and botanized with the Poet. But he could not be got to repeat the visit; and indeed, as he said himself, it was the last of the kind he paid anywhere, except to Mrs. Kemble. When he reached London, just after this visit, he wrote to Tennyson:

The note of the letters is always the same—warm affection, deep underlying admiration and regard, superficial banter and play of humour, and humorous, half-grumbling criticism. When they met face to face, after being parted for twenty years, they fell at once into exactly the old vein. FitzGerald was surprised at this, but he need not have been. Both were the sincerest and most natural of men, and nothing but distance and absence had occurred to sever them.

From the first he had conceived an intense and almost humble-minded admiration for Alfred. One of his earliest utterances describes his feelings, and strikes, with his keen critical perception, the true note. “I will say no more of Tennyson,” he wrote, “than that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have to think him great. His little humours and grumpinesses 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 over-shadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own—I could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind.”

[Pg 108]His descriptions in Euphranor, published some sixteen years later, of “the only living and like to live poet he had known,” tell the same tale. They speak of Tennyson’s union of passion and strength. “As King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, though as a great Poet comprehending all the softer stops of human Emotion in that Register where the Intellectual, no less than what is called the Poetical, faculty predominated. As all who knew him know, a Man at all points, Euphranor—like your Digby, of grand proportion and feature....”

There was no one for whose opinion he had so much regard, grumble though he might, and criticize as he would. He had a special preference for the poems at whose production he had assisted, which he had seen in MS., or heard rehearsed orally. Toward the later poems his feeling was not the same. The following extracts are all equally characteristic:

But his love for the man and his underlying belief in his opinion and genius never varied. “I don’t think of you so little, my dear old Alfred,” he wrote one day in the middle of their friendship, “but rejoice in the old poems and in yourself, young or old, and worship you (I may say) as I do no other man, and am glad I can worship one man still.”

His delight when he found that Alfred had really liked Omar was unusually naïf and keen. He forgot his grumbling, and wrote to Mrs. Tennyson:

When he had first “discovered” Omar, and was beginning to work upon him, Tennyson (who was then finishing the early “Idylls of the King”) had been one of the first to whom he wrote. It is worth remembering that FitzGerald was then in deep depression. It was the middle of the sad period of his brief, unhappy married life. This had proved a failure in London. It was proving a failure now in the country. He wrote:

In 1872 he was busy with the third edition of Omar,[Pg 111] and wrote to consult Tennyson. The first edition had contained only seventy-five quatrains. The second was a good deal longer, containing one hundred and ten. The third was again shortened to one hundred and one:

Another letter a little later refers to the same reprinting of Omar:

The next year, in 1873, he wrote again, touching on the same theme and others:

In September 1876 a lucky chance brought Tennyson and himself face to face again after twenty years. The Poet was travelling with his son, and together they visited him at Woodbridge. They found him, as Tennyson describes, in his garden at Little Grange. He was delighted to see them, and specially pleased with the son’s relation and attitude to his father.

Together he and Tennyson walked about the garden and talked as of old. When Tennyson complained of[Pg 114] the multitude of poems which were sent him, Old Fitz recommended him to imitate Charles Lamb and throw them into his neighbour’s cucumber frames. Tennyson noticed a number of small sunflowers, with a bee half-dying—probably from the wet season—on each, “Like warriors dying on their shields, Fitz,” he said. He reverted, of course, to his favourite Crabbe, and told the story of how Crabbe (when he was a chaplain in the country) felt an irresistible longing to see the sea, mounted a horse suddenly, rode thirty miles to the coast, saw it, and rode back comforted.

FitzGerald did not compliment them on their looks, because, he said, he had always noticed men said, “How well you are looking!” whenever you were going to be very ill. Therefore he had ceased saying it to any one. He told, too, a story of a vision, how he had one day clearly seen from outside his sister and her children having tea round the table in his dining-room. He then saw his sister quietly withdraw from the room, so as not to disturb the children. At that moment she died in Norfolk.[20]

He wrote shortly after this visit to Tennyson:

One of the poems after 1842 which he liked was the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington,” though characteristically he made a somewhat fastidious criticism on the “vocalization” of the opening.

The paradox is that it was FitzGerald who was always urging “Alfred” to go on, and finding fault with him for not doing more, and not singing in grander, sterner strains,—not becoming the Tyrtaeus of his country. In truth, Tennyson’s strength and physical force and his splendid appearance in youth, added to his mental grandeur, seem to have deeply impressed his youthful contemporaries. He was, they felt, heroic, and made for heroic songs and deeds. When he did go on, in his own way, FitzGerald did not like it, or only half liked it. For Tennyson did go forward on his own lines. He had not a little to daunt and deter him. He, too, had his sensitiveness and capacity for feeling and passion not less exquisite than FitzGerald’s own. FitzGerald said his friendships were more like loves. He was not alone in this attitude. “What passions our friendships were,” wrote Thackeray, another of the set, the early friend of[Pg 116] both FitzGerald and Tennyson. But of no friendship could such language be used more truly than of that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. When, however, the sundering blow fell, and the friendship which was a love lay shattered, Tennyson braced himself and went on. For

It becomes no man to nurse despair,
But in the teeth of clench’d antagonisms
To follow up the worthiest till he die.

His faith, even to the last, was still at times dashed with doubt, for, with “the universality of his mind,” he could not help seeing many sides of a question. But he “followed the Gleam,” as he has himself described. FitzGerald did the opposite. He drifted, he dallied, he delayed, he despaired. He ruined his own life in great measure by his marriage. His early ambitions seemed to wither prematurely, and he let his career slide. Yet he was always, as Mr. A. C. Benson has excellently brought out, admirable in his sincerity, his friendly kindliness, his innocence, his conscientious adherence to his literary standards. Too much has been made of his unconventionality, his slovenliness and slackness, his love of low or common company. He remained a gentleman and a man of business. Thackeray, a man of the world, when he was starting for America, wanted to leave him the legal guardian of his daughters. He was an Epicurean, not a Pyrrhonist. He took life seriously. He showed at times an austerity of spirit which was surprising. His Omar has often, and naturally, been compared to Lucretius and to Ecclesiastes. There is probably more of Lucretius about the poem, but more of Ecclesiastes about the translator.

There is another Epicurean, with whose tenets he might have been thought to show even more sympathy—the easy-going poet-critic Horace. Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam is the constant burden[Pg 117] of FitzGerald’s strain. His friendship, early formed, with Tennyson, the contrast of their divergent views, might be compared with the friendship of Horace and Virgil. For Virgil, too, began as an Epicurean. But FitzGerald was not content with Horace. “Why is it,” he wrote, “that I can never take up with Horace, so sensible, agreeable, elegant, and sometimes even grand?” It was, perhaps, just that masculine and worldly element that put him off. Yet he not seldom quotes Horace, and perhaps liked him better than he knew. “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,” he wrote in a copy of Polonius which he gave to a special friend, and Nature was what he was always seeking in poetry. Still he preferred Virgil, just as he really preferred Tennyson.

Though he was destined to produce a poem which bids as fair for immortality as any of its time, he did not think highly of his own powers as a poet. But he did plume himself on being a critic. “I pretend to no Genius,” he said, “but to Taste, which according to my aphorism is the feminine of Genius.” This was another gift in common. Tennyson was himself a consummate critic, as FitzGerald was the first to recognize.

FitzGerald had his limitations and his prejudices—his “crotchets.” He did not like many even of those whom the world has agreed to admire. He did not like Euripides or even Homer. With Goethe’s poems he could not get on. He eschewed Victor Hugo. He liked, indeed, very little of the prose and none of the poetry of his contemporaries, except that of the Tennysons. He could not away with Browning. Arnold, he wrote down “a pedant.” He thought very little of Rossetti and Swinburne, though the former, especially, was a great admirer not only of Omar but of Jami and some of the Spanish translations. He tried to read Morris’s Jason, but said, “No go.” He “could not read[Pg 118] the Adam Bedes and the Daisy Chains.” All this must be remembered when we read his criticism of Tennyson’s later work which belonged to the period of these writers and their productions. But within certain limits he was a very fine critic. It cannot be said of him as of his special favourite among Greek poets, Sophocles, that

He saw life steadily and saw it whole.

As he was aware himself, he by no means saw it whole. But with his detachment and his critical gift, it may, perhaps, be said:

He saw life lazily, but saw it plain.

To the question of Browning’s merits, or want of merits, he is always returning. A very characteristic letter is a long, discursive one, written to Tennyson himself in 1867:

Keats he put very high indeed. “I have been again reading Lord Houghton’s Life of Keats” he wrote, “whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning, Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are.” “What a fuss the cockneys make about Shelley just now, surely not worth Keats’ little finger,” he wrote on another occasion. And again, “Is Mr. Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the Athenæum tells me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets do grow nowadays.” And yet again, “I can’t read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters, Table-Talk,[23] etc.), whom I try in vain to admire.”

His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of “realism” but of reality.

Life’s sternest painter and its best—

the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. “I keep reading Crabbe from time to time,” he writes to Tennyson; “nobody else does unless it be another ‘paltry Poet’ whom I know. The edition only sells at a shilling a volume—second-hand. I don’t wonder at young people and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relishing even the good parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers.”

What he loved before all was “touches of nature,”[Pg 122] the humour, the pathos, of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and again the outwelling of native nobility, generosity, or love. Newman’s early Sermons, “Plain and Parochial” as they were, perhaps for this very reason he much affected. “The best that were ever written in my judgment,” he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of the Apologia and its “sincerity.” But he did not like the ritualism of the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical,—one reason perhaps why he liked Newman. John Wesley was “one of his heroes,” and he had much sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and revivalist Mission preaching.

He would have sympathized with Keble’s lines teaching that his fellow-creatures should not

Strive to wind themselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.

This was probably one of the reasons why he did not like “In Memoriam.” He said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious artist, both in his verse and in his prose. Omar is most carefully elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of Euphranor. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the matter than the form. He did not like the early “Idylls of the King.” “The Holy Grail” he liked as he had liked the “Vision of Sin.” But what moved him to tears was the old-style “Northern Farmer,” the “substantial, rough-spun Nature he knew,” and “the old brute, invested by the poet with the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare’s Shallow.” Yet even here a “crotchet” cropped up, as appears from the following note:

Again, when it appeared in 1865, he was greatly taken with the “Captain.” It was a return to the old personal mood and simple direct depiction of character:

He liked, too, “Gareth and Lynette,” which again he thought more natural and direct than some of the earlier Idylls. He liked, as might have been expected, the “Ballads and other Poems.” But what is most significant, perhaps, among his likes and dislikes, is his love for “Audley Court,” “one of my old favourites,” he calls it. Why did FitzGerald like “Audley Court”?[Pg 124] It is not one of the poems which are generally best known and most admired. Indeed, while it is in many ways beautiful and contains some splendid things, such as the sonorous line

The pillar’d dusk of sounding sycamores,

it is just one of those poems which the severe critic of Tennyson picks out for fault-finding and even for ridicule. It has what such critics call the over-elaborate, the “drawing-room” manner. Like Milton’s picture of Eve’s déjeuner, though with more humour and appropriateness, it employs the grand and sumptuous style to describe trifles, such as the venison pasty:

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied.

But on a closer consideration it will be seen that it has just what “Old Fitz” himself loved—the easy realism, the contentment with the things of this world; above all, that flavour of

After-dinner talk
Across the walnuts and the wine

which he also found and loved in that other favourite, “The Miller’s Daughter,” the harmless gossip about old friends

who was dead,
Who married, who was like to be, and how
The races went, and who would rent the hall.

This suited “Old Fitz’s” temper absolutely. The humorous pococurantism, for cynicism it hardly is, of the quatrains put into the mouth of the Poet’s friend, each ending “but let me live my life,” breathes the very spirit of his own indolent, kindly Epicureanism, and indeed the poem might almost be taken as a record of a dialogue between the two friends in their early days.

He loved, too, the “Lord of Burleigh,” “The Vision[Pg 125] of Sin,” and “The Lady of Shalott.” The delicious idealism of these youthful pieces did not displease him. They had for him a “champagne flavour.” They were part of his own youth. For a brief hour of that fast-fleeting day, the wine of life had sparkled in his own glass, but then too soon turned flat and flavourless.

For two or three things every lover of Tennyson must thank FitzGerald. He it was who, about 1838, soon after their friendship began, got his friend, Samuel Laurence, to paint the earliest portrait of the Poet, “the only one of the old days and still the best of all to my thinking,” as he wrote in 1871. He, too, preserved and gave to Tennyson the drawing by Thackeray of the “Lord of Burleigh.” When the Poet was rather dilatory in calling at Spedding’s house to claim this portrait, FitzGerald wrote: “Tell him I don’t think Browning would have served me so, and I mean to prefer his poems for the future.” He also rescued from the flames some of the pages of the famous “Butcher’s Book,” the tall, ledger-like MS. volume, in which many of the early poems he so much loved were written, and gave them to the Library of Trinity College. About this he wrote:

Tennyson appreciated “Old Fitz’s” fine qualities as a critic, but he recognized their limitations, and in particular his “crotchets” and prejudices. He was himself, as is now generally recognized, a consummate critic, and withal a most kindly and catholic one. In my first conversation with him he said that he used to think Goethe a good critic. “He always discovered all the good he could in a man.” To his own contemporaries, especially towards Browning, for example, his attitude was very different, as FitzGerald acknowledged, from FitzGerald’s own. I did not like, I remember, to ask him what he thought of Browning, but his son encouraged me to do so. “You ask him,” he said. “He’ll tell you at once.” At last I did so. “A true genius, but wanting in art,” he said. And on another occasion he spoke rather more in detail to the same purpose.

A special friend of both Tennyson and FitzGerald was Thackeray. With him FitzGerald had been intimate even earlier than with Tennyson. They were friends at college, and had gone as young men together to Paris, Thackeray ostensibly to study art. FitzGerald knew Paris of old. His father had a home there when he was a child, and went there for a few months every year for some years.

When he was nearing seventy FitzGerald wrote the following delightful account of some of his recollections to Thackeray’s daughter:

With Thackeray himself he always maintained the same cordial relations as he did with Tennyson. But his literary attitude shifted and varied in the same way. Here, again, he preferred the early work which he had seen in process of creation. In later years, when they met him at Woodbridge, he said to “Alfred” and his son, “I hardly dare take down Thackeray’s early books, because they are so great. It’s like waking the Thunder.” He wrote of Thackeray in 1849: “He is just the same. All the world ‘admires Vanity Fair,’ and the author is courted by Dukes and Duchesses and wits of both sexes. I like Pendennis much, and Alfred said he thought it was quite delicious: it seemed to him so mature he said.” But a little later he took alarm at the Dukes and Duchesses, and wrote to Frederick Tennyson: “I am come to London, but I do not go to Operas or Plays, and have scarce time (and[Pg 128] it must be said, scarce inclination) to hunt up many friends—I get shyer and shyer even of those I knew. Thackeray is in such a great world that I am afraid of him; he gets tired of me and we are content to regard each other at a distance. You, Alfred, Spedding, and Allen, are the only men I ever care to see again.... As you know, I admire your poems, the only poems by a living writer I do admire, except Alfred’s.”

He told Hallam Tennyson that he greatly admired the charming scene in “Philip” where the young lady unexpectedly discovered her lover (Philip) on the box of the diligence, and quieted the screaming children inside by saying, “Hush! he’s there.”

In particular, he was very severe on anything he called “cockney,” speaking, that is, the language of the town, not of the country; in other words, dealing with nature and human nature at second-hand. To this his letters again and again return. Of “fine writing,” as he called it, even when it occurred in his own early work, he was unsparingly critical. Thus of Euphranor he wrote to Mrs. Kemble: “The Dialogue is a pretty thing in some respects but disfigured by some confounded smart writing in parts.” He thought this fault in particular, so he says in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, “the loose screw in American literature,” and deplored its presence in Lowell, a writer whom otherwise he liked. “I honestly admire his work in the main,” he says, “and I think he is altogether the best critic we have, something of what Ste. Beuve is in French.” He thought that Tennyson came to suffer from these defects in his later days, and that the artist overpowered the man.

The latest of Tennyson’s poems, of course, he did not live to see. He did not see, for instance, “Crossing the Bar.” What would he have thought of it? Another old friend of Tennyson, also a fastidious critic, the Duke of Argyll, in an unpublished letter of February 1, 1892,[Pg 129] writing of this and of the lines on the “Death of the Duke of Clarence,” says: “Magnificent, is all I can say of your lines in the Nineteenth. The two last things of yours that I have seen, this and the ‘Bar,’ are both perfect in their several ways, and such as no other man could have written. The ‘Bar’ is the type of what I define Poetry to be, great thought in true imagery and unusual expression. All the three are needed for the type thing. Much fine poetry is to me only eloquence, which is quite another thing.” With the last sentence FitzGerald would certainly have agreed, for it is what in other words he was himself constantly saying. But he seemed to require something more than great thoughts and true images and choice diction. Poignant and revealing touches, what he called in Crabbe “shrewd hits”; feeling, as well as, if not more than, thought—this was what he asked for. All Browning’s genius seemed to him emphase, cleverness, curiosity, “cockneyism.”

“The Dramatic Idylls,” he writes to Frederick Tennyson, “seemed to me ‘Ingoldsby.’ It seems to me as if the Beautiful being already appropriated by former men of genius, those who are not inspired, can only try for a Place among them by recourse to the Quaint, Grotesque, and Ugly in all the Arts,—what I call the Gargoyle style.” And again: “I always said he must be a cockney, and now I find he is Camberwell-born—

It once was the Pastoral cockney,
It now is the cockney Profound.”

The establishment of the Browning Society tried him specially. “Imagine a man abetting all this,” he writes. Tennyson had, through life, a high opinion of FitzGerald’s powers of criticism. They had often in their youth discussed the classics of all time and all times together, and also, with the poetic freedom of young men, their seniors, Shelley, and Byron, and[Pg 130] Wordsworth. It was FitzGerald who invented for the last the name by which he went in their circle, of the “Daddy.” They had fought for the ownership of the Wordsworthian line, the “weakest blank verse in the language”:

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.

It really was FitzGerald’s description, given in conversation, of the gentleman who was going to marry his sister. When he died in 1862 FitzGerald, writing to Tennyson, reminded him of the line.

In the valedictory verses Tennyson makes allusion to this critical habit:

And when I fancied that my friend
For this brief idyll would require
A less diffuse and opulent end,
And would defend his judgment well,
If I should deem it over nice,——

He himself was more catholic and generous. It was his generosity as well as their admiration for him which gave him the place he held among his brother poets and especially after he himself had won recognition among the younger men.

His relation to Browning, Patmore, and P. J. Bailey, to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, to Watson and Kipling as to Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, are well known. There is one writer who ought to be added to the list, who received some of his earliest encouragement from Tennyson—George Meredith. A letter, hitherto unpublished, written in January 1851, may illustrate this.[Pg 131] He had just, in some trepidation, sent Tennyson his first volume of poems, containing the now well-known “Love in the Valley.” As Meredith told me himself, Tennyson replied with an exceedingly kind and “pretty” letter, saying that there was one poem in the book he could have wished he had written, and inviting Meredith to come to see him. The following is Meredith’s answer:

The complement to “Old Fitz” was Carlyle. He was the friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. Gruff, grumbling, self-centred, satirical, at times even rude and rough, as he was, both of them seemed to have got not so much on his blind, as on his kind side from the first, and always to have remained there. Carlyle’s descriptions of Tennyson as a young man in the early “forties” and of the pleasure he had in his company are well known. “He seemed to take a fancy to me,” Tennyson said himself one day while we talked about[Pg 132] him at Farringford. They foregathered a good deal at this period, sat and smoked silently, walked and talked together, both by day and night. FitzGerald told Hallam Tennyson, years after, during the visit to Woodbridge, that Carlyle was much concerned at this period about his father’s poverty, and said to him, “Alfred must have a pension.” The story of the way in which he spurred on “Dicky” Milnes to secure the pension is now classical. What his special effect, if he had any, on Tennyson was, it might be difficult to estimate or analyse.

The younger generation to-day does not remember the period of Carlyle’s immense influence. It lasted just into the youth of my contemporaries and myself, or perhaps a little longer, and then began to wane and die away. He certainly was a “radio-active” force in the days and with the men of Tennyson’s youth,—Maurice, and Sterling, and “Dicky” Milnes, as he was a little later with Ruskin and Kingsley. FitzGerald, with his detachment and his fearless sincerity, estimated him as fairly as any one. “Do you see Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets?” he wrote. “They make the world laugh, and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will still look for practical measures from him. One must be content with him as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong, though he cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle’s wildest rhapsodies.”

He wrote to Frederick Tennyson in 1850: “When I spoke of the ‘Latter-Day Prophet’ I conclude you have read or heard of Carlyle’s Pamphlets. People are tired of them and of him; he only foams, snaps, and howls and no progress people say. This is about true, and yet there is vital good in all he has written.” Again, in 1854, he says, “Carlyle I did not go to see, for I have really nothing to tell him, and I am[Pg 133] tired of hearing him growl, tho’ I admire him as much as ever.” “I wonder if he ever thinks how much sound and fury he has vented,” he writes on another occasion.

But the posthumous publication of Carlyle’s Letters, as he wrote about a fortnight before his own death, “raised him in FitzGerald’s esteem”; and his last effort was to go to Chelsea to see his statue, and the old house hard by which he had not seen for five-and-twenty years, to find it, alas, “deserted, neglected, and ‘To let!’”

Carlyle was indeed much what “Old Fitz” describes. He was a powerful solvent of his age. He destroyed many shams, “Hebrew rags,” “old clothes,” as he called them. Both by his own example and his fiery energy he inculcated the “Gospel of Work.” He was not a modern realist, but a man who dealt in realities, who perceived that virtue and beauty and faith are as real as vice and ugliness and unfaith, nay, perhaps more real; but that certainly neither are shams, neither God nor the Devil, though of shams, of false gods and false devils, there are many. His appreciation of poetry was, as is well known, but scant and intermittent. He used to banter Tennyson and call him “a Life-Guardsman spoiled by making poetry,” but he became converted even to his poems, though, as he said, this was surprising to himself. He “felt the pulse of a real man’s heart” in the 1842 volumes. “Ulysses” was a special favourite. He quoted again and again the lines:

It may be that the gulfs 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,” he said, “but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read.” He, fortunately, also “took a fancy” to Mrs. Tennyson when he met her as a bride at Tent Lodge, Coniston, partly because, in answer to one of his wild grumbles, she said, “That is not sane, Mr. Carlyle.”[Pg 134] An unpublished letter from Carlyle of the date October 1850, describes an admirer of Tennyson’s poems, an ill-starred but brave man, a skilful physician, a friend of Dr. John Carlyle at Leamington, who, after losing the greater part of his face by caries of the bone, had at last been cured, though awfully disfigured. “He fled to Keswick,” writes Carlyle, “and there he now resides, not idle still, nor forsaken of friends, or hope, or domestic joy—a monument of human courtesy, and really a worthy and rather interesting man. Such is your admirer and mine. Heaven be good to him and us.”

FitzGerald, in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, quotes with approval a criticism of Lowell’s that Carlyle “was a poet in all but rhythm”; and it would not be difficult to find “parallel passages” between Tennyson and Carlyle, between Sartor Resartus and “In Memoriam.” The Life of Sterling, too, should be read by any student anxious to “reconstitute the atmosphere” in which that poem grew up, and which, to a certain extent, it still breathes. But “parallel passages” are misleading. Suffice it to say that both went through the storm and stress of a doubting age, both took their stand on the solid rock of God and of real, healthy human nature,—both emerged in the “Eternal Yea.”

Froude, in his history of Carlyle’s Life in London, has a most interesting autobiographic passage about Carlyle’s position and influence in 1843, the time of the publication of Past and Present, which brings this out with special force. He says:

If the first paragraphs aptly “place” Tennyson and Carlyle, the last, though not intentionally, exactly suits their friend, the translator of the Rubáiyát. FitzGerald remained, as his friend the Master of Trinity College (W. H. Thompson) said, in “Doubting Castle.” Tennyson was the most hopeful, as well as the most balanced and sane, and therefore the most helpful of the three.

Toward the end of his life, Carlyle, in the Inaugural Address given by him as Rector of Edinburgh University, in which he summed up so many of the convictions of a lifetime, put forward the following description of the completely healthy human spirit. “A man all lucid and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear mirror, geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all things in their correct proportions, not twisted up into convex or concave and distorting everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless groping and manipulation—healthy, clear and free, and discerning all round about him.” He put this picture before young men as the[Pg 136] ideal to be aimed at by the intellectual student, and in particular by the man of letters. “But,” he said, “we can never never attain that at all.” Perhaps not altogether. Perhaps even he who invented the phrase for the poet’s duty of “holding the mirror up to Nature,” did not wholly attain to it. But, according to his measure, it is no bad description of Alfred Tennyson, with the “universality of his mind,” the simplicity of his good sense, the childlike sincerity of his spirit. This quality it was that both Carlyle and FitzGerald found and liked in him.

It has been said that Tennyson and FitzGerald read the same books. One of the best instances of this is to be found in a long letter of FitzGerald’s about posthumous fame and literary immortality. It was written to Cowell in 1847, and is given by Dr. Aldis Wright in his first collection. After speaking of Homer and the Iliad, FitzGerald writes:

This train of thought was evidently often present to FitzGerald’s mind. It oppressed him. It makes itself felt in the Rubáiyát. It was one of the many great ideas he imported into, or educed from, the old Persian Astronomer.

And fear not lest existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured
Millions of Bubbles like us and will pour

When you and I behind the Veil are past:
Oh but the long long while the world shall last,
Which of our coming and departure heeds
As the Sev’n Seas should heed a pebble-cast.

It was even more constantly present to the mind of Tennyson. Astronomy and Geology had been among his favourite studies from his early youth, and remained so all his life. When I was walking with him toward the Needles and looking at the magnificent chalk cliff below the downs, and spoke about his felicitous epithet for it—“the milky steep,” he said, “The most wonderful thing about that cliff is to think it was all once alive.” The allusions to it in his poems are innumerable:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

[Pg 138]He was always “hearing the roll of the ages.” He, too, had read his Lyell, and the contemplation of geological time suggested to him exactly the same reflections which FitzGerald draws out. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that he himself may have imparted them to FitzGerald. For he has embodied just these thoughts in that noble late poem “Parnassus,” with a resemblance which is startling. But while the parallel between “Parnassus” and FitzGerald’s letter is extraordinarily close up to a certain point, the contrast, when it is reached, is even more striking, and is the fundamental contrast between the two men and their creeds:

What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain,
Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain?
On those two known peaks they stand, ever spreading and heightening;
Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning!
Look, in their deep double shadow the crown’d ones all disappearing!
Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing!
Sounding for ever and ever? pass on! the sight confuses—
These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!

So far Tennyson agrees with Omar:

Ah make the most of what we yet may spend
Before we too into the dust descend;
Dust into dust and under dust to lie,
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and sans end!

But then comes the divergence, conveyed with the exquisitely sympathetic change of rhythm:

If the lips were touch’d with fire from off a pure Pierian altar,
Tho’ their music here be mortal, need the singer greatly care?
Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter;
Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homer there.

The beautiful lines which form the Envoy to “Tiresias,” already alluded to, never reached their address. I remember well, when we spoke of FitzGerald, the sadness with which Tennyson said to me, “He never saw them. He died before they were sent him.” After his death Tennyson added the Epilogue on[Pg 139] the same note. It is touching to see that in his closing lines to his old friend he had hinted with tender delicacy at the same creed to which he always clung:

Gone into darkness, that full light
Of friendship! past, in sleep, away
By night, into the deeper night!
The deeper night? A clearer day
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth—
If night, what barren toil to be!
What life, so maim’d by night, were worth
Our living out? Not mine to me
Remembering all the golden hours
Now silent, and so many dead
And him the last; and laying flowers,
This wreath, above his honour’d head,
And praying that, when I from hence
Shall fade with him into the unknown,
My close of earth’s experience
May prove as peaceful as his own.

Like many rough and overbearing men Carlyle liked those who stood up to him and gave him back, in his own phrase, “shake for shake.” FitzGerald was one of these. He made his better acquaintance by contradicting and correcting him about the battlefield and the buried warriors of Naseby Fight. Carlyle took it all in excellent part, and they became close friends. Carlyle went to visit him and invited the many letters which FitzGerald wrote. In his later years he sent one of these letters to C. E. Norton as a “slight emblem and memorial of the peaceable, affectionate, ultra-modest man and his innocent far niente life”; “and,” he adds, “the connection (were there nothing more) of Omar, the Mahometan Blackguard, and Oliver Cromwell, the English Puritan.”

But “Old Fitz” could criticize and sum up Carlyle equally effectively. He most happily pointed out his inconsistency in praising the “Hebrew rags” of the old Evangelical beliefs when seen in Cromwell and his generals, and not being willing to let them still serve for humble folk in his own day. His tone here is[Pg 140] singularly like that of Tennyson’s well-known lines, beginning:

Leave thou thy sister when she prays.

“We may be well content,” FitzGerald writes, “even to suffer some absurdities in the Form if the Spirit does well on the whole.” He would probably have agreed with much of Tennyson’s “Akbar’s Dream,” which he did not live to read. For the tenets of “Omar,” “The Mahometan Blackguard,” must not be taken as representing the whole of FitzGerald’s philosophy, any more than his eccentricities and negligent habits must be taken as a complete expression of his life.

Too exclusive attention has been paid to both. Dr. Aldis Wright, one of the few surviving friends who knew him really well, speaks justly of “the exaggerated stories of his slovenliness and his idleness,” and “of the way in which he has been made responsible for all the oddities of his family.” “Every tale,” he says, “that may be true of some of his kin, is fathered upon him.”

And FitzGerald’s own Preface to his translation of Omar shows what his real moral and religious attitude toward the Rubáiyát was. He felt bound, so far as the spirit, if not the letter, went, to present it faithfully, if not literally; but he speaks very gravely of it. “The quatrains here selected,” he writes in the Preface, “are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the ‘Drink and make merry’ which (genuine or not), recurs over frequently in the original. Either way, the result is sad enough, saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry, more apt to move sorrow than Anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavouring to unshackle his steps from Destiny and to catch some authentic Glimpse of To-morrow, fell back upon To-day (which has outlived so many To-morrows!) as the only ground he got[Pg 141] to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet.”

The truth is, Old Fitz’s foibles, and indeed his faults, were only too patent to others and to himself. But if noscitur a sociis holds good, Carlyle and Tennyson and Thackeray, Spedding, Thompson, the Cowells, and Mrs. Kemble, the friends of his whole lifetime, Lowell and C. E. Norton, those of his later years, may be permitted to outweigh his at times too tolerant cultivation and indulgence of his burly Vikings. Tennyson’s relation to him was summed up in his letter to Sir Frederick Pollock which Dr. Aldis Wright quotes, but which may fitly here be quoted again: “I had no truer friend; he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit.”

These words, with Tennyson’s poetic picture already quoted, with Carlyle’s epithets, “innocent, far niente, ultra-modest,” with his own writings taken as a whole and not Omar alone, especially his Letters, may be left to speak for him in life and in death,—these and the epitaph which he asked to have placed upon his gravestone:

“It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.”

[Pg 142]

[Many more were in a Notebook, which I have now lost.—E. F. G.]

By Edward FitzGerald

(Given to Hallam Lord Tennyson[24])

1835

(Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a week from dear Spedding’s Mirehouse at the end of May 1835,—resting on our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, he 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 days she wrought it, sitting all alone
Upon the hidden bases of the Hills.

“Not bad that, Fitz, is it?”

(One summer day looking from Richmond Star and Garter.)

“I love those woods that go triumphing down to the river.”

“Somehow water is the element which I love best of all the four.” (He was passionately fond of the sea and of babbling brooks.—Ed.)

“Some one says that nothing strikes one more on returning from the Continent than the look of our English country towns. Houses not so big, nor such[Pg 143] rows of them as abroad; but each house, little or big, distinct from one another, each man’s castle, built according to his own means and fancy, and so indicating the Englishman’s individual humour.

“I have been two days abroad—no further than Boulogne this time, but I am struck as always on returning from France with the look of good sense in the London people.”

(Standing before a Madonna, by Murillo, at the Dulwich Gallery—her eyes fixed on you.)

“Yes—but they seem to look at something beyond—beyond the Actual into Abstraction. I have seen that in a human face.” (I, E. F. G., have seen it in his. Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose it may be so with all Poets.)

1850

“When I was sitting by the banks of Doon—I don’t know why—I wasn’t in the least spoony—not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the Ages)—when all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears.”

“I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins who stood by said there was no one in the two parishes who could do it. I was then about twenty-five.” (He could carry his mother’s pony round the dinner-table.—E. F. G.)

“The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land’s End.” (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)

“Thackeray is the better artist, Dickens the [more affluent] Genius. He, like Hogarth, has the moral sublime sometimes: but not the ideal sublime. Perhaps I seem talking nonsense; I mean Hogarth could not conceive an Apollo or a Jupiter.” (Or Sigismunda.—E. F. G.)—“I think Hogarth greater than Dickens.”

[Pg 144](Looking at an engraving of the Sistine Madonna in which only She and the Child, I think, were represented.)

“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 result of human art. His attitude is that of a man—his countenance a Jupiter’s—perhaps rather too much so.”

(He afterwards said (1852) that his own little boy, Hallam, explained the expression of Raffaelle’s. He said he thought he had known Raffaelle before he went to Italy—but not Michael Angelo—not only Statues and Frescoes, but some picture (I think) of a Madonna “dragging a ton of a Child over her Shoulder.”)

Seaford: December 27th-28th, 1852

“Babies delight in being moved to and from anything: that is amusement to them. What a Life of Wonder—every object new. This morning he (his own little boy) worshipp’d the Bed-post when a gleam of sunshine lighted on it.”

“I am afraid of him. It is a Man. Babes have an expression of grandeur that children lose. I used to think that the old Painters overdid the Expression and Dignity of their infant Christs: but I see they did not.”

“I was struck at the Duke’s (Wellington’s) Funeral with the look of sober Manhood and Humanity in the British Soldiers.”

(Of Laurence’s chalk drawing of ——’s head—“rather diplomatic than inhuman”—he said in fun.—E. F. G.)

Brighton, 1852-1853

“The finest Sea I have seen is at Valentia (Ireland), without any wind and seemingly without a Wave, but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind it, it dashes[Pg 145] up into foam—blue diamond it looked like—all along the rocks—like ghosts playing at Hide and Seek.”

(At some other time on the same subject.)

“When I was in Cornwall it had blown a storm of wind and rain for days—all of a sudden fell into perfect calm; I was a little inland of the cliffs, when, after a space of perfect silence, a long roll of Thunder—from some wave rushing into a cavern, I suppose—came up from the Distance and died away. I never felt Silence like that.”

“This” (looking from Brighton Pier) “is not a grand sea: only an angry curt sea. It seems to shriek as it recoils with its pebbles along the beach.”

“The Earth has light of her own—so has Venus—perhaps all the other Planets—electrical light, or what we call Aurora. The light edge of the dark hemisphere of the moon—the ‘old Moon in the new Moon’s arms.’”

“Nay, they say she has no atmosphere at all.”

(I do not remember when this was said, nor whether I have exactly set it down; therefore must not make A. T. answerable for what he did not say, or for what after-discovery may have caused him to unsay. He had a powerful brain for Physics as for the Ideal. I remember his noticing that the forward-bending horns of some built-up mammal in the British Museum would never force its way through jungle, etc., and I observed on an after-visit that they had been altered accordingly.)

“Sometimes I think Shakespeare’s Sonnets finer than his Plays—which is of course absurd. For it is the knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine.”

“Do you think the Artist ever feels satisfied with his Song? Not with the Whole, I think; but perhaps the expression of parts.”

(Standing one day with him looking at two busts—one of Dante, the other of Goethe, in a London shop,[Pg 146] I asked, “What is wanting to make Goethe’s as fine as the other’s?”)

“The Divine.” (“Edel sei der Mensch” was a poem in which he thought he found “The Divine.”—Ed.)

(Taking up and reading some number of Pendennis at my lodging.) “It’s delicious—it’s so mature.”

(Of Richardson’s Clarissa, etc.) “I love those great, still Books.”

“What is it in Dryden? I always feel that he is greater than his works.” (Though he thought much of “Theodore and Honoria,” and quoted emphatically:

More than a mile immerst within the wood.)

“Two of the finest similes in poetry are Milton’s—that of the Fleet hanging in the air (Paradise Lost), and the gunpowder-like ‘So started up in his foul shape the Fiend.’ (Which latter A. T. used to enact with grim humour, from the crouching of the Toad to the Explosion.) Say what you please, I feel certain that Milton after Death shot up into some grim Archangel.” N.B.—He used in earlier days to do the sun coming out from a cloud, and returning into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting of eyes and lips, etc. And, with a great fluffing up of his hair into full wig, and elevation of cravat and collar, George the Fourth in as comical and wonderful a way.

“I could not read through Palmerin of England, nor Amadis of Gaul, or any of those old romances—not even ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ though with so many fine things in it—But all strung together without Art.”

Old Hallam had been speaking of Shakespeare as the greatest of men, etc. A. T. “Well, he was the Man one would have wished to introduce to another Planet as a sample of our kind.”

Àpropos of physical stature, A. T. had been[Pg 147] noticing how small Guizot looked beside old Hallam (when he went with Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay over the Houses of Parliament.—Ed.).

“I was skating one day at full swing and came clash against a man of my own stature who was going at the same. We both fell asunder—got up—and laughed. Had we been short men we might have resented.”

(I blamed some one for swearing at the servant girl in a lodging.) “I don’t know if women don’t like it from men: they think it shows Vigour.” (Not that he ever did so himself.)

“There is a want of central dignity about him—he excuses himself, etc.”

“Most great men write terse hands.”

“I like those old Variorum Classics—all the Notes make the Text look precious.”

(Of some dogmatic summary.) “That is the quick decision of a mind that sees half the truth.”

[Pg 148]

By Lady Ritchie

... You ask me what I can remember of your Father and of mine in early days. I seem to know more than I actually remember....

In looking over old letters and papers, I have found very few mentions of the many actual meetings between them, though again and again the Poet’s name is quoted and recorded, nor can I recall the time when I did not hear it spoken of with trust and admiring regard. To this day we possess “The Day Dream,” copied out from beginning to end in my Father’s writing.

He was about twenty years of age when one day, in May 1832, he wrote down in his diary:

Then again ...

And again:

After my Father’s marriage, when he was living in Coram Street, Tennyson and FitzGerald both came to see him there. In an old letter of my mother’s she[Pg 149] describes Mr. Tennyson coming and my sitting at the table beside her in a tall chair and with a new pinafore for the occasion. FitzGerald, I think, also spoke of one of these meetings, and of my Father exclaiming suddenly, “My dear Alfred, you do talk d—— well.”

As we grew up, the Tennyson books were a part of our household life. I can especially remember one volume, which came out when I was a little girl and which my Father lent to a friend, and I also remember his laughing vexation and annoyance when she returned the book all scored and defaced with absurd notes and marks of exclamation everywhere.

I once published an article in an American magazine from which I venture to quote a passage which tells of one of the early meetings:

Being themselves, when men, such as these two men, appreciate each other’s work, they know, with their great instinct for truth and directness, what to admire—smaller people are apt to admire the men rather than the work.[Pg 150] When Tennyson and my Father met, it was as when knights meet in the field.

How my Father appreciated the Idylls will be seen from the following letter, which came as an answer to his own:[25]

I can remember all my Father’s pleasure when Alfred Tennyson gave him “Tithonus” for one of the early numbers of the Cornhill Magazine.

He was once at Farringford, but this was before the time of the Cornhill.

From America, where people store their kindly records and from whence so many echoes of the past[Pg 151] are apt to reach us again,—some in worthy, and some, I fear, in less worthy voices,—I have received from time to time, the gift of an hour from the past, vivid and unalloyed. One day in the Century magazine, I came upon a page which retold for me the whole story of a happy hour and of my Father’s affectionate regard for that chivalrous American, Bayard Taylor, who came to see him, and for whom he had wished to do his best, by sending him to Farringford. All this came back to me when Alfred Tennyson’s letter was reproduced in the Century, his charming answer to my Father, and my Father’s own note in the margin.... Bayard Taylor himself has put the date to it all—June 1857.

My Father writes to Bayard Taylor:

The letter from Lord Tennyson runs as follows:

Afterwards Bayard Taylor found his way to Farringford, and he has written a happy account of the visit.[26]

I hardly know whether or not to give the record of a meeting which I myself remember. Once after a long[Pg 152] visit to Freshwater I returned home to Palace Green, and hearing that Alfred Tennyson had come up soon after to stay for a few days at Little Holland House close by, I told my Father, and together we planned a visit, to which I eagerly looked forward, with much pride and youthful excitement. It was not far to walk, the high road leads straight to Holland House, in the grounds of which Little Holland House then stood among the trees. Mr. and Mrs. Prinsep were living there and Mr. Watts. When we reached the House and were let in, we saw Mr. Watts in his studio; he seemed to hesitate to admit us; then came the ladies. Mr. Tennyson was upstairs, we were told, not well. He had hurt his shin. “He did not wish for visitors, nevertheless certainly we were to go up,” they said, and we mounted into a side wing by some narrow staircase and came to a door, by which cans of water were standing in a row. As we entered, a man-servant came out of the little room.

Tennyson was sitting in a chair with his leg up, evidently ill and out of spirits.

“I am sorry to find you laid up,” said my Father.

“They insisted upon my seeing the doctor for my leg,” said Alfred, “and he prescribed cold water dressing.”

“Yes,” said my Father, “there’s nothing like it, I have tried it myself.”

And then no more! No high conversation—no quotations—no recollections. After a minute or two of silence we came away. My tall Father tramped down the little wooden staircase followed by a bitterly disappointed audience.

When I was writing that same magazine article from which I have already given an extract, I asked Edward FitzGerald if he could help me, and if I[Pg 153] might quote anything from his letters and from Euphranor:

In 1863, just after our Father’s death, my sister and I came to Freshwater. It seemed to us that perhaps there more than anywhere else we might find some gleam of the light of our home, with the friend who had known him and belonged to his life and whom he trusted.

We arrived late in the afternoon. It was bitter weather, the snow lying upon the ground. Mrs.[Pg 154] Cameron had lent us a cottage, and the fires were already burning, and as we rested aimlessly in the twilight, we seemed aware of a tall figure standing in the window, wrapped in a heavy cloak, with a broad-brimmed hat. This was Tennyson, who had walked down to see us in silent sympathy.

[Pg 155]

[Pg 156]

[Pg 157]

TO W. C. MACREADY

1851

TO THE REV. F. D. MAURICE

TO SIR JOHN SIMEON

IN THE GARDEN AT SWAINSTON

TO EDWARD LEAR, ON HIS TRAVELS IN GREECE

TO THE MASTER OF BALLIOL

(PROFESSOR JOWETT)

TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL

The Drive at Farringford, showing on the left the “Wellingtonia” planted by Garibaldi.
From a drawing by W. Biscombe Gardner.

TO GIFFORD PALGRAVE[30]

 [Pg 165]

TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA

TO W. E. GLADSTONE

 [Pg 168]

TO MARY BOYLE

(Dedicating “The Progress of Spring.”)

 [Pg 171]

TO W. G. WARD

IN MEMORIAM

TO SIR RICHARD JEBB

 [Pg 172]

TO GENERAL HAMLEY

(Prologue of “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade.”)

 [Pg 173]

EPITAPH ON LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

EPITAPH ON GENERAL GORDON

IN THE GORDON BOYS’ NATIONAL MEMORIAL HOME NEAR WOKING[46]

G. F. WATTS, R.A.