Galton had known intimately some of Tennyson’s friends, such as Sumner Maine, W. G. Clark, Franklin Lushington, and specially “Harry” Hallam, younger brother of Arthur. He was, I think, as full of hero-worship for the Poet as I was myself. The fame which he has since won in connexion with Science may make it difficult, even for his later friends, to understand the passion — I can use no weaker word — which he then cherished for some branches of imaginative literature, in particular for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and for at least three of Kingsley’s novels, Alton Locke, Yeast, and Westward Ho! These we used in the course of our Easter rambles to read out in the open air after an al-fresco lunch.
Tennyson’s works were all very familiar to Galton. He had known them at Cambridge as each came out, and had discussed them eagerly with admiring friends, some of them first-rate critics. He delighted not only in the subtlety and elevation and freedom of the thoughts, but also in the beauty and perfection and melody of the expression.
We went, as I have said, to call on the Poet. We went together with rather beating hearts. He received us cordially as Trinity men, but unfortunately I can remember no detail of any kind. I am not sure whether we were even introduced to Mrs. Tennyson. All I remember is that we left the house happy and exhilarated.
But my real acquaintance with the Tennyson family dates from the end of 1861 and the early days of 1862. My first marriage had been on December 19, 1861, and a few days afterwards we came to Freshwater, and stayed at the hotel close to the sea, where Dr. and Mrs. Vaughan had sometimes stayed during his Harrow Mastership. It was then that we first met the Granville Bradleys, destined to be our dear friends for life, and it was in their company that we soon found ourselves most kindly welcomed guests at Farringford.
The two first incidents that I remember were the Poet showing us the proof of his “Dedication of the Idylls,” and, at our request, reading out to us “Enoch Arden.” The “Dedication” must have been composed almost immediately after the death of the Prince Consort on December 14. He seemed himself pleased with it. I thought at the time, and I have felt ever since, that these lines rank high, not only among his other tributes of the same kind, but in the literature of epitaphs generally. We felt it a proud privilege to be allowed to stand at his side as he looked over the proof just arrived by the post, and it led us of course to talk sympathetically of the late Prince and the poor widowed Queen.
Very soon after, the Bradleys and we dined at Farringford. The dinner hour was, I think, as early as six, and then, after he had retreated to his sanctum for a smoke, he would come down to the drawing-room, and read aloud to his guests. On this occasion he read to us “Enoch Arden,” then only in manuscript. I had before heard much of his peculiar manner of reading, with its deep and often monotonous tones, varied with a sudden lift of the voice as if into the air, at the end of a sentence or a clause. It was, as always, a reading open to criticism on the score of lack of variety, but my dear bride and I were in no mood to criticize. The spell was upon us. Every note of his magnificent voice spoke of majesty or tenderness or awe. It was, in plain words, a prodigious treat to have heard him. We walked back through the winter darkness to our hotel, conscious of having enjoyed a unique privilege.
During this vacation I had, as often in after years, not a few walks with him on the downs, leaving the Beacon on the left and going on to the Needles. It was a walk of about two hours. It is here that my memory so sadly fails me as to his talk. In tone it was friendly, manly, and perfectly simple, without a touch of condescension. He seemed quite unconscious that he was a great man, one of the first Englishmen of his time, talking to one young and utterly obscure. Almost any subject interested him, grave or gay. He would often talk of metres, Greek and Latin; of attempts to translate Homer; of the weak points in the English hexameter; or again of more serious topics, on which he had thought much and felt strongly, such as the life after death, the so-called “Eternity of Future Punishment,” the unreality of the world as known to the senses, the grander Human Race, the “crowning race,” still to be born.
Occasionally, not very often in these days, he would speak of his own poems. Once, I remember, a few days after an examination of the sixth form at Harrow, I told him that we had set for Greek Iambics the fine passage in “Elaine,” where Lancelot says to Lavaine:
... in me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great.
There is the man,
pointing to King Arthur. “Yes,” he said in substance, “when I wrote that, I was thinking of Wordsworth and myself.”
I noticed that he never spoke of Wordsworth without marked reverence. Obviously, with his exquisite ear for choice words and rhythm, he must have been more sensitive than most men to the prosaic, bathetic side of Wordsworth; but I never heard him say a word implying that he felt this, whereas I have heard him qualify his admiration for Robert Browning’s genius and his affection for his person by some allusion to the roughness of his style. This, he thought, must lead to his being less read than he deserved in years to come, and he evidently regretted it.
It was in the period, roughly speaking, between 1862 and 1880 that I saw most of him, for it was then our habit to make frequent visits to Freshwater or Alum Bay, generally at Christmas, and we were always received with the same cordial kindness. It was then that the long walks and the readings of his poetry after dinner continued as a kind of institution, and never palled. Among the poems that he read out to us were “Aylmer’s Field,” the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” parts of “Maud,” “Guinevere,” “The Holy Grail,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Revenge,” “The Defence of Lucknow,” “In the Valley of Cauteretz.” With regard to this beautiful poem I cannot help recalling an amusing and most unexpected laugh. He had read the third and fourth lines in his most sonorous tones:
All along the valley, where thy waters flow,
I walked with one I loved two and thirty years ago;
and then suddenly, changing his voice, he said gruffly, “A brute of a —— has discovered that it was thirty-one years and not thirty-two. Two-and-thirty is better than one-and-thirty years ago, isn’t it? But perhaps I ought to alter it.”
It was at this time that we used often to meet Mr. Jowett and also the Poet’s great friend and admirer, the gifted Mrs. Cameron and her dignified and gray-bearded husband, who looked like a grand Oriental Chief.
One trifling incident occurs to me as I write, the Poet’s remarkable skill at battledore. One duel with him in particular comes back to my mind, in which I found it hard to hold my own. He was a very hard hitter. He did not care merely to “keep up” long scores. He liked each bout to be a trial of strength, and to aim the shuttlecock where it would be difficult for his opponent to deal with it. In spite of his being short-sighted he played a first-rate game. With the exception of my brother Arthur, I never came upon so formidable an antagonist.
But I must leave these earlier years, of which I cannot find any written record, and pass on to the end of 1886, when, nearly four years after the death of my dear wife and a year and a half after my leaving Harrow, I was, to my great surprise, appointed Master of Trinity.
On December 3 I was installed, and on December 13 I was invited to Farringford, with the prospect of returning on the 16th to Davos Platz, where I had left my invalid daughter. Of this short visit I find I have made a few notes. The Poet was as cordial as ever. After dinner he took me to his sanctum, and read me his new Jubilee Ode in Catullian metre, and then “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.” Next morning there came a letter from Dr. W. H. Thompson’s executor containing an early poem of Tennyson’s of 1826, and a Sonnet, once famous, complaining of defects in the College system of his day:
Therefore your Halls, your ancient Colleges,
Your portals statued with old kings and queens,
Your gardens, myriad-volumed libraries,
Wax-l
ighted chapels, and rich carven screens,
Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans,
Shall not avail you, when the Day-beam sports
New-risen o’er awaken’d Albion. No!
Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow
Melodious thunders thro’ your vacant courts
At noon and eve, because your manner sorts
Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart,
Because the lips of little children preach
Against you, you that do profess to teach
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.
About eleven o’clock the Poet took me out alone. We went first to Freshwater Gate, where he said the “maddened scream of the sea” in “Maud” had been first suggested to him. He talked of our late friend, Philip Stanhope Worsley, the translator of the Odyssey and half of the Iliad, who was living there a good many years ago, and whom I had met at his table. He admired him much. He talked also, but I forget to what effect, of “The Holy Grail” and the old Arthur myth, but before this we talked of the Cambridge Sonnet just mentioned. “There was no love,” he said, “in the system.” I understood him to mean that the dons, as a rule, were out of sympathy with the young men. He spoke also of the bullying he had undergone at his first school; how, when he was a new boy of only seven and a half, he was sitting on the school steps crying and homesick. Up came a big fellow, between seventeen and eighteen, and asked him roughly who he was and what he was crying for, and then gave him a kick in the wind! This experience had evidently rankled in his mind for more than seventy years. Again, in April 1890, he told me the same story.
But to return to our morning walk of December 14, 1886. Something led me to speak of my favourite lines:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Spedding, it seems, and others had wanted him to alter the “one good custom.” “I was thinking” he said, “of knighthood.” He went on to speak of his “Experiments in Quantity,” and in particular of the Alcaic Ode to Milton, beginning:
O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies.
“I thought that,” he said, “a bit of a tour de force,” and surely he was right there. He tilted a little at C. S. Calverley for demurring to
God-gifted organ-voice of England.
“I didn’t mean it to be like your
‘September, October, November’;
I was imitating, not Horace, but the original Greek Alcaic, though Horace’s is perhaps the finest metre.” The two Latin metres which I have more than once heard him admire were the Hexameter and the Alcaic.
I find that in my Journal I wrote as regards this walk: “I wish I could remember more. He was wholly facilis, and I never felt less afraid of him or more reverent.” Perhaps I should add that during the walk he told me an extraordinary number of ghost stories — a man appearing to several people, and then vanishing before their eyes.
After dinner that evening we went to his sanctum to hear him read the last Act of the “Promise of May.” “Well, isn’t that tragic?” he naïvely asked at one point, I think where Eva falls down dead.
Next morning, I had to leave quite early for London. He just appeared at the top of the stairs, and offered to come down to say good-bye, but I would not let him. “I can remember little more of this delightful visit,” so I wrote at the time. “He was full, as usual, of the public lies, and the necessity of England being strong at sea.”
I did not see him again till after my second marriage, which took place on August 9, 1888. We paid a flying visit to Lambert’s Hotel, Freshwater, in April 1889. Of this I have made only the scantiest record. Something led us to speak of the famous line in the chorus of the Agamemnon:
ὀμμάτων ἐν ἀχηνίαις.
“So modern,” he remarked. He also spoke of the pathos of Euripides, and of the grandeur of the “Passing of Oedipus” in the Oedipus Coloneus, and Theseus
χεῖρ᾽ ἀντέχοντα κρατός.
He referred again to lack of sympathy in his time between dons and undergraduates. This seemed to be a memory often present to his mind.
Our next visit was in March 1890, when, with my wife’s sister, we stayed at Lambert’s Hotel. On Friday, March 28, we went to tea at Farringford, and found him in his little sun-trap of a summer-house, the evening sun playing full upon us, and bringing into perfect beauty the green lawn, the spreading trees, and the clumps of daffodils. He began by speaking of himself as depressed, but soon smiled away all such symptoms, and made us laugh with a story of the Duke of Wellington, when some prosy personage addressed him with a flattering compliment. He always seemed to enjoy anecdotes of the Great Duke. He was wearing a red cap which, in the sunlight, became him well; but he said playfully that Lady Tennyson disliked it as too suggestive of a “bonnet rouge.” Something, I forget what, led to a reference to the well-known verse:
Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
He once asked a rather gushing lady what sort of birds she supposed these to be. “Nightingales,” was the rather sentimental answer. “Who ever heard a nightingale say ‘Maud’?” was the somewhat stern reply. “They were rooks of course.”
My wife mentioned that she and her sister had been reading the “Idylls” of late. “Do you mean my Īdylls,” he said; “I am glad you don’t call them Ĭdylls.” We soon got talking of his recently published “Crossing the Bar.” When asked what was the precise grammatical reference in the third line of the verse:
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home,
he answered rather emphatically, “I meant both human life and the water.” He went on, “They say I write so slowly. Well, that poem came to me in five minutes. Anyhow, under ten minutes.” Afterwards, when I had some quiet talk with Lady Tennyson, she confirmed what he had implied as to the rapidity with which he usually composed.
At this point I shall do well to insert extracts from my dear wife’s journal, describing a few incidents in what proved our last visit to Farringford. It was at the end of January 1892, when the Poet, born on August 6, 1809, was well on in his eighty-third year. She writes as follows:
VISIT TO FARRINGFORD, JANUARY 1892
By Mrs. Montagu Butler
On January 26 Montagu and I left our two small boys at Eton Villa, Shanklin, to spend the night at Lambert’s Hotel, Freshwater. After leaving our traps at the hotel we walked up to Farringford in time for two o’clock lunch. I sat next the Poet at table, and had some talk with him. He spoke of the metres of Horace, and said that he always thought his Sapphics uninteresting and monotonous. “What a relief it is,” he said, “when he does allow himself some irregularity, for instance:
Laurea donandus Apollinari.”
On the other hand, he admired his Alcaics immensely. The discovery for which he always hoped the most was of some further writings of Sappho herself. He considered the metre beautiful under her treatment.
Then we spoke of Schliemann, of whom I had just been reading in Schuchardt’s book, and he said he had no faith in him. “How could a great city have been built on a little ridge like that (meaning Hissarlik)? Where would have been the room for Priam’s fifty sons and fifty daughters?”
He also thought the supposed identifications of topography absurd, and preferred to believe that Homer’s descriptions were entirely imaginary. When I said that I thought that a disappointing view, he called me “a wretched localizer.” “They try to localize me too,” he said. “There is one man wants to make out that I describe nothing I have not seen.” Also, with some irritation, of other accounts of himself: “Full of lies, and —— made me tell a big one at
the end.”
Next day we walked up at about 12.20 to accompany him in his morning walk. Montagu and he were in front, Hallam Tennyson and I behind. Montagu tells me how he was indignant with Z. for charging him with general plagiarism, in particular about Lactantius and other classics, “of whom,” he said, “I haven’t read a word.” Also, of taking from Sophocles, “whom I never read since I was a young man”; and of owing his “moanings of the sea” to Horace’s gementis litora Bospori. Some one charged him with having stolen the “In Memoriam” metre from some very old poet of whom he had never heard. He said, in answer to Montagu’s question, that the metres of both “Maurice” and “The Daisy” were original. He had never written in the metre of Gray’s Elegy, except epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. He admired the metre much, and thought the poem immortal.
Hartley Coleridge, he said, spoke of Pindar as the “Newmarket Poet.” He thought the loss of his Dithyrambs most serious, judging from the remaining fragment. He had from early boyhood been familiar with the fact that Wolsey and Cromwell in Henry VIII. were by Fletcher, but he felt absolutely certain that the description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was by Shakespeare’s own hand. He quoted it, as well as several lines from Wolsey. When I said how glad I was he had written about the Duke of Clarence, he said, “Yes, but I wouldn’t write an Installation Ode for the Chancellor.”
So far Montagu reported. After this we others came up, and the old Poet and I walked home together.
We spoke a little of our projected tour to Greece. He had never been there, but would have greatly liked to go — in a private yacht—”but they tell me an old man is safest at home, and I dare say it is true; and I couldn’t stand the vermin!” I told him I was hoping to study classical architecture a little before going out, and he said that he thought, after all, Gothic architecture was finer than classic. “It is like blank verse,” he said; “it will suit the humblest cottage and the grandest cathedral. It has more mystery than the classic.” He thought many of our cathedrals spoiled by their vile glass. He had been disappointed, in his late visit to Cambridge, to notice that the windows in King’s seemed to be losing their brilliancy and to look dark.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series Page 203