Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  After we had been walking a few minutes in silence, he said to me, “Do you see what the beauty is in the line,

  That all the Thrones are clouded by your loss?” —

  quoting from his still unpublished poem on the young Prince. I said I thought it very beautiful; but he asked if I saw why he had used the word clouded instead of darkened or another. “It makes you think of a great mountain,” he explained. Then he spoke of the great richness of the English language due to its double origin, the Norman and Saxon words. How hard it would be for a foreigner to feel the difference in the line

  An infant crying for the light,

  had the word baby been substituted, which would at once have made it ridiculous. He told me that his lines “came to” him; he did not make them up, but that, when they had come, he wrote them down, and looked into them to see what they were like. This was very interesting, especially as he had told Montagu, at Easter, 1890, that he had composed “Crossing the Bar” in less than ten minutes.

  Then he said again, what I have heard him say before, that though a poet is born, he will not be much of a poet if he is not made too. Then he asked me if I was fond of Pindar. I am very glad that he admires him greatly. He could not believe Paley’s theory that Pindar is earlier than Homer. I vented my dislike of Paley’s horribly prosaic translations in his notes on Aeschylus, and he said he had always used Blomfield, he found his Glossary such a help.

  We were now indoors, and in a few minutes went in to luncheon. I was again seated next him, and we had some more talk. He got upon the subject of College life, and told me anecdotes of himself and his friends, one very amusing one about Tom Taylor. During some vacation Tom Taylor’s rooms were lent by the College authorities to a farmer, a member of an Agricultural Society which they were entertaining. Taylor knew this perfectly well; but in the middle of the night suddenly entered the room, in a long traveller’s cloak and with a lantern in his hand, “Pray, what are you doing in my room, sir, and in my bed?” feigning great surprise and indignation. The poor old farmer tried to explain that he was honoured by being the guest of the College, but Taylor refused to be pacified; when suddenly, in the midst of their altercation, enter Charles Spring Rice, brother of Stephen, personating the Senior Dean, who forthwith laid forcible hands on Tom Taylor. Thereupon ensued a regular scuffle, in which they both tumbled on to the bed, and Tom Taylor got so much the worst of it that the kindly agriculturist began to intercede, “Oh, please, Mr. Dean, don’t be too hard on the young man!”

  Tennyson himself had been proctorized once or twice. Once, during the first few days of his College life, he came out to receive a parcel by a midnight mail. “Pray, sir, what are you doing at this time of night?” said the Proctor. “And pray, sir, what business of yours is it to ask me?” replied the Freshman, who in his innocence knew nothing about the Proctor. He was told to call upon him next day, but then explained his ignorance, and was let off.

  On one occasion a throng of University men outside the Senate House had been yelling against Whewell. Tennyson was standing by the door of Macmillan’s shop, and raised a counter-cry for Whewell. He was, however, seen standing, and was sent for to Whewell. “I was surprised, sir, to see you among that shouting mob the other day.” “I was shouting for you,” was the reply. Whewell was greatly pleased, and grunted his approbation.

  Another funny story. A wine-party was going on in Arthur Hallam’s rooms in the New Court, when enter angrily the Senior Dean, “Tommy Thorp.” “What is the meaning, Mr. Hallam, of all this noise?” “I am very sorry, sir,” said Hallam, “we had no idea we were making a noise.” “Well, gentlemen, if you’ll all come down into the Court, you’ll hear what a noise you’re making.” “Perhaps,” admits Tennyson, “I may have put in the all.”

  So ends my wife’s short journal, and it only remains for me to sum up very briefly the impressions left upon me, after a lapse of fifty, forty, thirty, twenty years, by these visits to Farringford which once made so large a part of my interest and my happiness.

  Little as I am able to put these impressions into words, I can say with truth that no personality with which I have ever come in close touch, either seemed to me at the time, or has seemed in later recollection, to cover so large, so rich, and so diverse a field for veneration, wonder, and regard.

  Tennyson was, and is, to me the most remarkable man that I have ever met. Often when I was with him, whether in long walks or in his study, and when I came to think of him silently afterwards, I used to recall his own lines on Wellington:

  Our greatest yet with least pretence...,

  Rich in saving common-sense,

  And, as the greatest only are,

  In his simplicity sublime.

  Simple, natural, shrewd, humorous; feeling strongly on a vast variety of subjects, and saying freely just what he felt; passing rapidly and easily from the gravest matters of speculation or conduct to some trifling or amusing incident of the moment, or some recollection of the years of his youth; he seemed to me unconscious of being a great man, though he must have known himself to be one of the foremost thinkers, and quite the foremost poet of his day. He was wholly free from affectation. He was never an actor of a part. There was about him always an atmosphere of truth.

  Truth-teller was our Alfred named,

  was a line that again and again recurred to the memory as one heard him speak out his mind either on men, or on politics, or on the deepest mysteries of philosophy or religion. He was pre-eminently one of the Children of Light. Of light, whether from science, or from literary criticism, or from the progress of the human conscience, he hailed thankfully and expectantly every fresh disclosure. There was a deep reverence in him for the Unseen, the Undiscovered, the as yet Unrevealed. This on the intellectual side; and on the moral side there was a manly, a devout, and a tender veneration for purity and innocence and trustfulness, and, to borrow his own stately words, written early in his life:

  Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.

  I regret that I cannot convey more worthily what I have felt in the presence of this great and truly noble man. To go to either of his beautiful homes, to see him as the husband of his wife and the father of his sons, was to me and mine for many years a true pilgrimage, both of the mind and of the heart. That I was once able to feel this, and that I am able to feel it gratefully even now, I count among the richer blessings of a long and happy life.

  TENNYSON AND W. G. WARD AND OTHER FARRINGFORD FRIENDS by Wilfrid Ward

  Among Tennyson’s friends in his later years was my father — William George Ward — who was his neighbour at Freshwater from 1870 to 1882. I have been asked to contribute to the picture of “Tennyson and his Friends” some account of their intercourse, and at the same time to set down some of the extremely interesting comments on his own poems which I myself was privileged yet later to hear from the Poet. I need not say that such an act of piety in regard of two men for whom I have so deep a reverence is a work of love, and I only regret that my recollections of what so well deserves recording should be so imperfect and fragmentary.

  Tennyson’s friendship with my father began at a date considerably subsequent to their first acquaintance. My father came rather unexpectedly into the family property in the Isle of Wight in 1849 when his uncle died without a son; but he did not desire to leave the house Pugin had built for him in Hertfordshire, where he had settled immediately after he joined the Catholic Church in 1845. He and the late Cardinal Vaughan were, in the ‘fifties, doing a work for ecclesiastical education at St. Edmund’s College, Ware — a work which came to my father naturally as the sequel to his share in the Oxford Movement. Therefore, when Tennyson in 1853 came to live in the Isle of Wight my father was an absentee. He tried in 1858 for two years to live at his grandfather’s old home near Cowes, Northwood Park, but his health broke down, and he returned to Hertfordshire. In the ‘sixties, however, he used to pay long visits to Freshwater, in the scenery of which he delighted; and, on one of these oc
casions, Tennyson was introduced to him by their common friend, Dean Bradley. The meeting was not, I think, a great success on either side. Later on, however, in 1870, when my father, despairing of the Cowes climate, built a house at Freshwater, he was Tennyson’s near neighbour, and they soon became great friends.

  Arthur Tennyson.

  Tennyson’s friendship with my father grew up from close neighbourhood, and from the fact that they had so much more in common with each other than with most of their other Isle of Wight neighbours. It was cemented by my father’s devotion to Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Tennyson, who, in her conversation, he always said, reminded him of the John Henry Newman of Oxford days. Also they had many friends in common — such as Dean Stanley, Lord Selborne, and Jowett — who often visited Freshwater. They were both members of the Metaphysical Society, and loved to discuss in private problems of religious faith which formed the subject of the Society’s debates. They were also both great Shakespearians. But most of all they were drawn together by a simplicity and directness of mind, in which, I think, they had few rivals — if I may say of my own father what every one else said. Nevertheless, their intimacy was almost as remarkable for diversity of interests as for similarity. It might seem at first sight to be a point of similarity between them that each revelled in his way in the scenery of the beautiful island which was their home. Yet the love of external nature was very different in the two men. It had that marked contrast which Ruskin has described in his Modern Painters. Ruskin contrasts three typical ways of being affected by what is beautiful. There is first “the man who perceives rightly because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose — a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself — a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.”

  My father’s imagination was of the second order, Tennyson’s of the third. My father often perceived wrongly, or not at all, because he felt so strongly. Consequently, while the bold outlines of mountain scenery and the large vistas of sea and down in the Isle of Wight moved him greatly, he did not look at them with the accurate eye of an artist; and the minute beauty of flowers and trees was non-existent for him. Tennyson, on the contrary, had the most delicate and true perception of the minute as well as the great. Each man chose for his home a site which suited his taste. Weston was on a high hill with a wide view. Farringford was lower down and buried in trees. The two men used sometimes to walk together on the great Down which stretches from the Needles rocks to Freshwater Bay, on which the boundary between Tennyson’s property and my father’s is marked by the dyke beyond the Tennyson memorial cross. At other times they walked in the Freshwater lanes. And there was a suggestion in these different surroundings of their sympathy and of their difference. The immense expanse of scenery visible from the Beacon Down was equally inspiring to both, but the lanes and fields which were full of inspiration to Tennyson had nothing in them which appealed to W. G. Ward. If he heard a bird singing, the only suggestion it conveyed to him was of a tiresome being who kept him awake at night. Trees were only the unpleasant screens which stood in the way of the view of the Solent from his house, and which he cut down as fast as they grew up. To Tennyson, on the contrary — as we see constantly in his poetry — there was a whole world of interest in Nature created by his knowledge of botany and natural history, as well as by his exceptionally accurate and observant eye.

  Let me quote the words of a great critic — the late Mr. Hutton — on this characteristic of the Poet:

  No poet has so many and such accurate references to the vegetable world, and yet at the same time references so thoroughly poetic. He calls dark hair

  More black than ash-buds in the front of March;

  auburn hair,

  In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell

  Divides three-fold to show the fruit within.

  He is never tired of reflecting in his poetry the physiology of flowers and trees and buds. The “living smoke” of the yew is twice commemorated in his poems. He tells us how the sunflower, “shining fair,”

  Rays round with flames her disk of seed;

  observes on the blasts “that blow the poplars white”; and, to make a long story short — for the list of instances might be multiplied to hundreds — in his latest published “Idylls of the King,” he thus dates an early hour in the night:

  Nigh upon that hour

  When the lone hern forgets his melancholy,

  Lets down his other leg, and, stretching, dreams

  Of goodly supper in the distant pool.

  When Tennyson and W. G. Ward walked together there was then a most curious contrast in their attitude towards the Nature that surrounded them, — Tennyson noting every bird, every flower, every tree, as he passed it, Ward buried in the conversation, and alive only to the great, broad effects in the surrounding country.

  W. G. Ward was himself not only no poet, but almost barbarously indifferent to poetry, with some few exceptions. He was exceedingly frank with Tennyson, and plainly intimated to him that there was very little in his poetry that he understood or cared for. But this fact never impaired their friendship. Indeed, I think Tennyson enjoyed his almost eccentric candour in this and in other matters, and he used, in later years, to tell me stories which illustrated it. Once when the question of persecution had been debated at the Metaphysical Society he remarked to my father, “You know you would try to get me put into prison if the Pope told you to.” “Your father would not say ‘No,’” Tennyson said to me. “He only replied, ‘The Pope would never tell me to do anything so foolish.’”

  I think his intercourse with my father did a good deal to diminish a certain prejudice against Roman Catholicism; and his intimacy with my father’s chaplain — Father Haythornthwaite, a man as opposed to the popular conception of a Jesuit as could well be imagined — told in the same direction. “When Haythornthwaite dies,” Tennyson once said, “I shall write as his epitaph: ‘Here lies Peter Haythornthwaite, Human by nature, Roman by fate!’”

  W. G. Ward’s own extreme frankness led Tennyson to remark to a friend: “The popular idea of Roman Catholics as Jesuitical and untruthful is contrary to my own experience. The most truthful man I ever met was an Ultramontane. He was grotesquely truthful.”

  Tennyson would sometimes retort in kind to my father’s frank criticisms, and once, after vainly trying to decipher one of his letters, observed that the handwriting was “like walking-sticks gone mad,” a curiously true description of my father’s very peculiar characters.

  As with scenery, so with poetry; my father only took in broad effects and simple pathos, and would single out for special admiration such a poem as the “Children’s Hospital,” over which he shed many tears.

  Tennyson soon accustomed himself to my father’s indifference to his poetry in general. But he hoped that, at all events, his metaphysical poems would interest his neighbour, and sent him the MS. of “De Profundis” when he wrote it; but the reply was only an entreaty that he would put explanatory notes to it when it should be published. One exception, however, must be made in favour of “Becket,” which Tennyson read aloud to Ward, who, greatly to his own surprise, admired it enthusiastically. “How do you like it?” Tennyson asked, and the reply was, “Very much, though I did not expect to like it at all. It is quite splendid. The development of character in Chancellor and Archbishop is wonderfully drawn. Where did you learn it all?”

  I used to think there was a good deal that was alike between the intercourse of Tennyson with my father and his intercourse with my father’s old friend, Dr. Jowett of Balliol. In both cases there was the same complete frankness — an unans
werable reply to those who gave it out that Tennyson best enjoyed the society of flatterers. Jowett, however, understood Tennyson’s poetry far better than my father did. It was sometimes strange to see that impassive figure, so little given to emotion, so ready to snub in others any display of feeling, under the spell of the Poet’s lines. I recollect once at Farringford listening with Jowett after dinner to Tennyson’s reading of his “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.” It was a poem which his peculiar chant made most moving, and he read the concluding lines with special pathos:

  Speak no more of his renown,

  Lay your earthly fancies down,

  And in the vast cathedral leave him;

  God accept him, Christ receive him.

  Tennyson then turned to address some observation to Jowett, but no reply came, and we soon saw that the Master was unable to speak. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. I ventured to allude to this some time later in talking to Jowett, and he said, “What would you have? The two Englishmen for whom I have the deepest feeling of reverence are Tennyson and the great Duke of Wellington. And one of them was reading what he had himself written in admiration of the other!”

  When my father died Tennyson visited his grave in company with Father Haythornthwaite, who spoke to me of the visit directly afterwards. A cross of fresh flowers had been placed on the grave until the monument should be erected. Tennyson quoted Shirley’s couplet: