Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series
Page 202
The last of the Catullus poems I want to refer to he never read to me as a whole. It is the lovely Epithalamium in honour of Junia and Manlius, calling on Hymenaeus to attend and bless the marriage:
Collis o Heliconii
Cultor, Uraniae genus,
Qui rapis teneram ad virum
Virginem, o Hymenaee Hymen,
O Hymen Hymenaee!
Dweller on the mount of Helicon,
Seed of the Heavenly One,
Thou that bearest off the tender maiden to her bridegroom,
O Hymenaean Hymen,
O Hymen Hymenaean!
I do not know if he ever read it as a whole to any one. It would have been splendid to hear, but towards the end of the long poem, where the poet, like Spenser, prays, “Send us the timely fruit of this same marriage night,” comes a verse he was very fond of quoting, and in particular the third line:
Torquatus volo parvulus
Matris a gremio suae
Porrigens teneras manus
Dulce rideat ad patrem
Semhiante labello.
I want a baby-boy Torquatus to stretch out his little hands from his mother’s lap, and sweetly to smile upon his father with half-opened lips.
These, I think, were the most remarkable of the Catullus poems he showed me, though of course there were others. I come now to the kindred Greek genius, who had a special fascination for him, the poetess Sappho. He loved her Sapphics, and greatly disliked the Sapphics of Horace, “with their little tightly curled pigtails.” I believe I owe it to him that I am a worshipper of that most marvellous muse of Sappho....
[Editorial Note. — Unhappily Mr. Dakyns never completed his paper. For, while still engaged on it, he died suddenly, June 21, 1911. A friend, Miss F. M. Stawell, has added the following notes from recollections of what Mr. Dakyns said or wrote to her on the subject.]
Mr. Dakyns’s manuscript breaks off abruptly, but he left some headings for what he intended to write: Sappho, Goethe, Béranger, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Life at Farringford, The French Tour and Clough, Clough and the Pyrenees. I think he would have quoted first from Sappho the lines beginning:
οἷον τὸ γλυκυμᾶλον ἐρεύθεται ἀκρῷ ἐπ᾽ ὐσδῷ
Like the sweet apple that reddens upon the topmost bough,
for he loved the passage, and the book was left open at this page.
No doubt he would have gone on to quote others that were favourites both with the Poet and with himself. Such as the heart-sick cry of love:
δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα
καὶ Πληιάδες, μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὥρα,
ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.
The moon has set, the Pleiades have gone;
Midnight! The hour has past, and I
Sleep here alone.
Or again:
γλυκεῖα μᾶτερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἱστόν,
πόθῳ δαμεῖσα παιδὸς βραδινὰν δι᾽ ᾽Αφροδίταν
Dear mother mine, I cannot weave my web —
My heart is sick with longing for my dear,
Through Aphrodite fair.
And he would probably have included that longer poem of passion which has been the wonder of the world, that invocation to
Starry-throned, immortal Aphrodite.
ποικιλόθρον᾽, ἀθάνατ᾽ ᾽Αφροδίτα.
Mr. Dakyns did not tell me himself what he had learnt of Simonides from Tennyson, but Tennyson quoted the following poems to his eldest son, Hallam. The sad, comforting, beautiful chant of Danaë to her baby, afloat on the waters, was quoted in one of Mr. Dakyns’s last letters to me, when his mind was full of his unfinished article. He wrote: “Isn’t that lovely and tear-drawing? true and tender and sempiternal?” And then he copied out the whole song, in case I should chance not to have the text at hand, with J. A. Symonds’s translation beside it:
ὅτε λάρνακι ἐν δαιδαλέᾳ
ἄνεμός τέ μιν πνέων κινηθεῖσά τε λίμνα
δείματι ἤριπεν, οὔτ᾽ ἀδιάντοισι παρειαῖς,
ἀμφί τε Περσέϊ βάλλε φίλην χεῖρα,
εἶπέ τ᾽· ὦ τέκος, οἷον ἔχω πόνον.
σὺ δ᾽ ἀωτεῖς, γαλαθηνῷ τ᾽ ἤτορι κνώσσεις ἐν ἀτερπεῖ
δούρατι χαλκεογόμθῳ,
νυκτὶ ἀλαμπεῖ κυανέῳ τε δνόφῳ σταλείς·
ἅλμαν δ᾽ ὕπερθε τεᾶν κομᾶν βαθειᾶν
παριόντος κύματος οὐκ ἀλέγεις,
οὐδ᾽ ἀνέμου φθόγγον,
πορφυρέᾳ κείμενος ἐν χλανίδι, καλὸν πρόσωπον.
εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν,
καί κεν ἐμῶν ῥημάτων λεπτὸν ὑπεῖχες οὖας.
κέλομαι δ᾽, εὗδε βρέφος, εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος,
εὑδέτω δ᾽ ἄμετρον κακόν·
μεταιβολία δέ τις φανείη, Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἐκ σέο·
ὅτι δὲ θαρσάλεον ἔπος
εὔχομαι νόσφιν δίκας, συγγνῶθί μοι.
When in the carven chest
The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest
Smote her with fear, she not with cheeks unwet
Her arms of love round Perseus set,
And said: “O child, what grief is mine!
But thou dost slumber, and thy baby breast
Is sunk in rest.
Here in the cheerless, brass-bound bark,
Tossed amid starless night and pitchy dark,
Nor dost thou heed the scudding brine
Of waves that wash above thy curls so deep,
Nor the shrill winds that sweep —
Lapped in thy purple robe’s embrace
Fair little face!
But if this dread were dreadful, too, to thee,
Then would’st thou lend thy listening ear to me;
Therefore I cry, Sleep, babe, and sea be still,
And slumber our unmeasured ill!
Oh, may some change of fate, sire Zeus, from Thee
Descend our woes to end!
But if this prayer, too overbold, offends
Thy justice, — yet be merciful to me.
It was natural also that the heroic poems of Simonides should have appealed to both men, and of special interest to know the delight that Tennyson took in one of these, and perhaps because of the similarity shown by his own splendid lines in the “Duke of Wellington” Ode:
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro’ the long gorge to the far light has won
His path upward, and prevail’d,
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun.
ἔστι τις λόγος
τὰν ἀρέταν ναίειν δυσανβάτοις ἐπὶ πέτραις·
ἁγνὰν δέ μιν θεὰν χῶρον ἁγνὸν ἀμφέπειν.
οὐδὲ πάντων βλεφάροις θνατῶν ἔσοπτος,
ῳ μὴ δακέθυμος ἱδρῶς
ἔνδοθεν μόλῃ, ἵκῃ τ᾽ ἐς ἄκρον
ἀνδρείας.
There is a tale
That Valour dwells above the craggy peaks
Hard, hard to scale,
A goddess pure in a pure land, and none
May see her face,
Save those who by keen Toil and sweat have won
That highes
t place,
That goal of manhood.
And with these heroic lines go the others on the men who fell at Thermopylae:
τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων
εὐκλεὴς μὲν ἁ τύχα, καλὸς δ᾽ ὁ πότμος,
βωμὸς δ᾽ ὁ τάφος, πρὸ γόων δὲ μνᾶστις, ὁ δ᾽ οἶκτος ἔπαινος·
ἐντάφιον δὲ τοιοῦτον οὔτ᾽ εὐρὼς
οὔθ᾽ ὁ πανδαμάτωρ ἀμαυρώσει χρόνος.
ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ὅδε σακὸς οἰκέταν εὐδοξίαν
‘Ελλάδος εἵλετο· μαρτυρεῖ δὲ Λεωνίδας,
ὁ Σπάρτας βασιλεύς, ἀρετᾶς μέγαν λελοιπὼς
κόσμον ἀέναόν τε κλέος.
Of those who fell at far Thermopylae,
Fair is the fate and high the destiny:
Their tomb an altar, memory for tears
And praise for lamentation through the years.
On such a monument comes no decay,
And Time that conquers all takes not away
Their greatness: for this holy Sepulchre
Of valiant men has called to dwell with her
The glory of all Greece. Bear witness, Sparta’s king,
Leonidas! thy ever-flowing spring
Of fame and the high beauty of thy deed!
There is a kindred note echoing through the popular catch in praise of the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, one of the first bits of Greek that Tennyson made his sons learn:
ἐν μύρτου κλαδὶ τὸ ξίφος φορήσω,
ὥσπερ ‘Αρμόδιος καὶ ᾽Αριστογείτων,
ὅτε τὸν τύραννον κτανέτην
ἰσονόμους τ᾽ ᾽Αθήνας ἐποιησάτην.
In myrtle I wreathe my sword
As they wreathed it, the brave,
Brave Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
When they slew the oppressor, the lord,
And to Athens her freedom gave.
Mr. Dakyns must have rejoiced in a spirit that could feed boys on such gallant stuff as this.
From Goethe he would have selected the noble proem to Faust:
Ihr naht Euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,
for there was a note among his papers to that effect.
And there is one note about Béranger (written in a letter):
It was he too who introduced me to Béranger, e.g. “Le Roi d’Yvetot,” and the refrain:
Toute l’aristocratie à la lanterne!
And how he read it! Like the Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus of Catullus quoted above — with fire and fury, tauriformis Aufidus-like — a refrain which, like the “Marseillaise,” stirred my republican spirit νόσφιν δίκας, inordinately, I mean, and in a monstrous cruel sort of way: but what he liked was the form and force of the language, the pure art and horror of it, I imagine.
Mr. Dakyns, in the short time I knew him, often spoke to me about Tennyson, and always with stress on “the width of his humanity,” and how he could appreciate works at which a smaller man might have been shocked; how, for example, he sympathized with the inmost spirit of Hugo’s cry to the awful vastness of God:
Je sais que vous avez bien autre chose à faire
Que de nous plaindre tous;
saw nothing irreverent in it, as lesser critics have done; found in it rather a fortifying quality against “the grief that saps the mind.” “I wish you could have heard him read it,” he wrote afterwards, “in his organ-voice.” Once he said to me how much he had wanted Tennyson to write the Ode on the Stars which was always floating before his mind: “He could have done it, for he had the sense of vastness. And it would have been a far finer work than the ‘Idylls of the King.’”
Tennyson also, he told me, was the first man to tell him about Walt Whitman, and the first passage he showed him was one of the most daring Whitman ever wrote. On his side Whitman had a deep feeling for Tennyson and used to write of him affectionately as “the Boss,” a touch that pleased Mr. Dakyns greatly, for he admired and loved Walt. He gave me a vivid impression of Tennyson’s large-heartedness in all kinds of ways: for instance, his own opinions were always intensely democratic, and the Tennysons sympathized rather with the old Whig and Unionist policy, but he said it never made any difference or any jar between them. “I remember his coming into my little study at the top of the house and finding me absorbed in Shelley, and asking me what I was reading, and I was struck at the time by the quiet satisfied way in which he took my answer, no cavil or criticism, though I knew he did not feel about Shelley as I did.... I don’t know how to give in writing the true impression of his dear genial nature. It often came out in what might seem like roughnesses when they were written down. He was very fond of Clough: and Clough at that time was very taciturn — he was ill really, near his death — and I remember once at a discussion on metre Clough would not say one word, and at last Tennyson turned to him with affectionate impatience, quoting Shakespeare in his deep, kindly voice, ‘Well, goodman Dull, what do you say?’ How can I put that down? I can’t give the sweet humorous tone that made the charm of it. And then people called him ‘gruff.’ His ‘gruffness’ only gripped one closer.”
Another time he told me with keen enjoyment of Tennyson’s discovering a likeness to him in some drawing on the cover of the old Cornhill — I think it was the figure of a lad ploughing — pointing to it like a child and saying, “Little Dakyns.” He would speak with delight of Tennyson’s humour, far deeper and wilder, he said, than most people would have guessed, Rabelaisian even in the noble sense of the word, and always fresh and pure.
“I remember an instance of my own audacity,” he said, “at which I almost shudder now. We were riding into a French town, it was the evening of a fête, and the whole population seemed to be capering about with the most preposterous antics. It struck a jarring note, and the Poet said to me, ‘I can’t understand them, it’s enough to make one weep.’ Somehow I couldn’t help answering — but can you imagine the audacity? I assure you I trembled myself as I did so—’Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.’ And he took it, he took it! He did indeed!”
The memories of Clough also were very dear to Mr. Dakyns, and he said he could never help regretting that he had not heard him read his last long work, “In Mari Magno,” to the Poet. “Tennyson said to me afterwards, ‘Clough’s Muse has lost none of her power,’ and I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt that I had not been asked to hear the reading: perhaps it was vanity on my part.”
Clough always came down to see them bathe. He was very fond of bathing himself, but could not take part in it then on account of his health. “I never feel the water go down my back now,” Mr. Dakyns said, “without thinking of Clough.”
But the sweetest of all the memories was, I think, the memory of the valley at Cauteretz, sacred to Tennyson because of Arthur Hallam. I heard Mr. Dakyns speak of that the first time he was at our house. My mother chanced to ask him what he did after taking his degree, and he said, “I was with the Tennysons as tutor to their boys, and we went to the Pyrenees.” The name and something in his tone made me start. “Oh,” I said, “were you with them at Cauteretz?” He turned to me with his smile, “Yes, I was, and if I had not already a family motto of which I am very proud, I should take for my legend ‘Dakyns isn’t a fool’” (the last phrase in a gruffly tender voice). And then he told us: “There was a fairly large party of us, the Tennysons, Clough, and myself, some walking and some driving. Tennyson walked, and I being the young man of the company, was the great man’s walking-stick. When we came to the valley — I knew it was a sacred place — I dropped behind to let him go through it alone. Clough told me afterwards I had done well. He had noticed it, and the Poet said — and it was quite enough—’Dakyns isn’t a fool!’”
I
t was that evening that Tennyson wrote “All along the Valley.”
RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON by the Rev. H. Montagu Butler, D.D.
(Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.)
You have asked me to put on paper some recollections of the many happy visits which it was my good fortune to pay to Farringford and Aldworth between 1860 and 1890. I wish that I could respond to this kind request more worthily; but the truth is, that, though I have always counted those visits among the happiest events of my life, and though my memory of the general impression left upon me on each occasion is perfectly clear, it is not clear, but on the contrary most confused and hazy, as to any particular incidents.
Speaking first generally in the way of preface, I may say that it would be difficult to exaggerate the hero-worship with which I regarded the great Poet, ever since I was a boy. Before I went up to Trinity in 1851, he had been the delight of my friends and myself at Harrow. And further, through members of the Rawnsley family, I had heard much of his early days when the Tennysons lived at Somersby.
During my life at Trinity, from 1851 to 1855, and then, with long intervals of absence, till the end of 1859, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Tennyson, but especially Tennyson, were the three poets of the nineteenth century who mainly commanded the reverence and stirred the enthusiasm of the College friends with whom I lived. Robert Browning became a power among them almost immediately after, but by that time I had gone back to Harrow. Matthew Arnold and Clough and Kingsley also attracted us greatly in their several ways, and of course Shelley and Keats, but Tennyson was beyond a doubt our chief luminary. “In Memoriam” in particular, followed by “Maud” and the first four “Idylls of the King,” was constantly on our lips, and, I may truly say, in our hearts, in those happy hours.
It was with these feelings, then, and these prepossessions that I was prepared to make the acquaintance of the great Poet, should such an honour ever be granted me. It came first, to the best of my recollection, when my late brother-in-law, Francis Galton, and I were taking one of our delightful walking trips or tramps in the Easter holidays. Galton used to plan everything — district, hours, stopping-places, length of each day’s march. One Easter — I forget which, but it must have been about 1859 — was devoted to the New Forest. From there we crossed over to the Isle of Wight; and after visiting Shanklin and Bonchurch, we walked round to Freshwater. To leave Freshwater without paying our homage to the Poet at Farringford was impossible. Whether we had any definite introduction to him, I cannot now remember, but we had reason to think that we should be kindly received. My brother Arthur had lately been paying more than one visit to that part of the Island, and had keenly enjoyed several long walks with him. His report of these was not lost upon me.