Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  not very good; and (N.B.) I don’t mean it suggested anything in Shakespeare’s Northern Farmer — for that may pair off with Shallow.

  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:

  Markethill, Woodbridge,

  October 22nd, 1865.

  Dear Mrs. Tennyson — Talking of ships again, I liked much The Captain in the People’s Alfred. Was the last stanza (which I like also) an afterthought? — I think a really sublime thing is the end of Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!” — (which I never could read through) — The Chase of the Ships: the Hero’s being struck blind at the moment of revenge: then his being taken to see his rival and crew at the bottom of the sea. Kingsley is a distressing writer to me: but I must think this (the inspiration of it) of a piece with Homer and the Gods — which you won’t at all.

  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”? 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 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:

  Markethill, Woodbridge,

  December 4th, 1864.

  Dear Alfred — Now I should be almost ready to be “yours ever, etc.” if I didn’t remember to ask you if you have any objection to my giving two or three of the leaves of your old “Butcher’s Book” (do you remember?) to the Library at Trinity College? An admirer of your’s there told me they would be glad of some such thing — It was in 1842, when you were printing the two good old volumes: — in Spedding’s rooms — and the “Butcher’s Book,” after its margins serving for pipe-lights, went leaf by leaf into the fire: and I told you I would keep two or three leaves of it as a remembrance. So I took a bit of my old favourite “Audley Court”: and a bit of another, I forget which: for I can’t lay my hands on them just now. But when I do, I shall give them to Trinity College unless you are strongly opposed. I dare say, however, you would give them the whole MS. of one of your later poems: which probably they would value more.

  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:

  Woodbridge, May 18th, 1875.

  Dear Annie Thackeray — I suppose you love Paris as your Father did — as I used to do till it was made so other than it was, in the days of Louis XVIII. when I first lived in it. Then it was all irregular and picturesque; with shops, hotels, cafés, theatres, etc. intermixed all along the Boulevards, all of different sorts and sizes.

  Think of my remembering the then Royal Family going in several carriages to hunt in the Forest of St. Germain’s — Louis XVIII. first, with his Gardes du Corps, in blue and silver: then Monsieur (afterwards Charles X.) with his Guard in green and gold — French horns blowing—”tra, tra, tra” (as Madame de Sévigné says), through the lines of chestnut and limes — in flower. And then Madame (of Angoulême) standing up in her carriage, blear-eyed, dressed in white with her waist at her neck — standing up in the carriage at a corner of the wood to curtsey to the English assembled there — my mother among them. This was in 1817. Now you would have made a delightful description of all this; you will say I have done so, but that is not so. And yet I saw, and see, it all.

  Whenever you write again — (I don’t wish you to write now) tell me what you think of Irving and Salvini; of the former of whom I have very different reports, Macready’s Memoirs seem to me very conscientious and rather dull; toujours Megready (as one W. M. T. irreverently called him). He seems to me to have had no humour — which I also observed in his acting. He would have made a better scholar or divine, I think: a very honourable, good man anywhere and anyhow.

  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 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, 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 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.

  “This letter,” he writes, “ought to be on a black-edged paper in a black-edged cover: for I have just lost a brother-in-law — one of the best of Men. If you ask, ‘Who?’ I reply, in what you once called the weakest line ever enunciated:

  A Mister Wilkinson, a Clergyman.

  You can’t remember this: in Old Charlotte Street, ages ago!”

  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. 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:

  Sir — When I tell you that it would have been my chief ambition in publishing the little volume of poems you have received, to obtain your praise, you may imagine what pride and pleasure your letter gave me; though, indeed, I do not deserve so much as your generous appreciation would bestow, and of this I am very conscious. I had but counted twenty-three years when the book was published, which may account for, and excuse perhaps many of the immaturities. When you say you would like to know me, I can scarcely trust myself to express with how much delight I would wait upon you — a privilege I have long desired. As I suppose the number of poetic visits you receive are fully as troublesome as the books, I will not venture to call on you until you are able to make an appointment. My residence and address is Weybridge, but I shall not return to Town from Southend before Friday week. If in the meantime you will fix any day following that date, I shall gladly avail myself of the honour of your invitation. My address here is care of Mrs. Peacock, Southend, Essex. I have the honour to be, most faithfully yours,

  George Meredith.

  Alfred Tennyson, Esq.

  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 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 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!’”