Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  My soul is heavy, and my sickness sore —

  Wilt Thou, O God, for ever hide Thy face?

  O! turn to me once more.

  Madeira, November 30, 1853.

  Drake’s career at Eton and Cambridge really interested him, for my old friend was an ardent worshipper of the Poet in days before Tennyson’s fame had become a national asset. I showed with some pride “Of old sat Freedom on the heights,” translated into Latin Alcaics, a version very popular with Etonians and King’s men. Scholarship has made gigantic strides since it appeared; “those who know” can read and see if we overvalued it.

  OF OLD SAT FREEDOM

  Idem — Latine redditum

  Of old sat Freedom on the heights,

  The thunders breaking at her feet:

  Above her shook the starry lights:

  She heard the torrents meet.

  There in her place she did rejoice,

  Self-gather’d in her prophet-mind,

  And fragments of her mighty voice

  Came rolling on the wind.

  Then stept she down thro’ town and field

  To mingle with the human race,

  And part by part to men reveal’d

  The fulness of her face —

  Grave mother of majestic works,

  From her isle-altar gazing down,

  Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks,

  And, King-like, wears the crown:

  Her open eyes desire the truth.

  The wisdom of a thousand years

  Is in them. May perpetual youth

  Keep dry their light from tears;

  That her fair form may stand and shine,

  Make bright our days and light our dreams,

  Turning to scorn with lips divine

  The falsehood of extremes!

  Olim insedebat montibus arduis

  Disiecta cernens sub pede fulmina

  Divina Libertas; superque

  Astra faces agitare vidit;

  Et confluentes audiit undique

  Amnes, opertis in penetralibus

  Exultat, et ritu Sibyllae

  Mente sua latet involuta,

  Sed vocis altae fragmina praepetes

  Venti ferebant. — Inde novalia

  Per culta discendens, per urbes

  Diva homines aditura venit,

  Ut vultus aegros ante oculos virûm

  Sensim pateret — mox parit integram

  Virtutem et altari marino

  Suppositum speculatur orbem —

  Quae seu deorum more acies gerit

  Dextra trifurcas, seu caput induit

  Regina regali corona.

  Expetit, insequiturque verum.

  Quae mille victrix experientiam

  Collegit annos: o Dea, sic tibi

  Aeterna si duret iuventus

  Neu lacrymis oculi madescant;

  Sic enitebis, sic dabis aureos

  Dies alumnis, aurea somnia;

  Sic ore divino refelles

  Quae properat malesuadus error.

  When distinguished visitors came to the Island, who were on terms of friendship with the Poet, I gave him warning that I should not appear on the scene and spoil their pleasure; but to this condition he would not assent, and I can recall frequent occasions when I must have been a fly in the ointment, and the Jowetts, Bradleys, and distinguished Americans would have wished me at Jericho. Once I felt entirely at my ease, for I determined to start the subject of Dr. Johnson, worshipped by me from my boyhood. I knew my Birkbeck Hill pretty well by heart, having quite recently read the six volumes of his edition of Boswell, notes and all, to a blind friend who rejoiced in hearing them. Further than that, I had made a pilgrimage to Lichfield, and by the kindness of a Mr. Lomax, who owned the relics, had examined and handled a varied assortment of goods and chattels, once undoubtedly the property of the great Samuel. The pedigree was thus accounted for by my courteous showman. After Dr. Johnson’s death, Barber, his black servant, migrated from London to Lichfield, “bringing his sheaves with him”; amongst the spolia opima were a huge teapot and a manuscript copy of Devotions. Fortified with the recollections of this pilgrimage, and some out-of-the-way facts told to me by the residentiary Canon, my dear old friend Bishop Abraham, I started on a two hours’ walk with the Poet and Professor Jowett. It was easy to lead up to the theme of conversation — there was no difficulty whatever. I thought of Johnson’s own plan of extinguishing subjects which he intended at all costs to avoid. When Mrs. Neale asked his opinion of the conversational powers of Charles James Fox, “he talked to me one day at the Club,” said he, “concerning Catiline’s conspiracy, so I withdrew my attention and thought about Tom Thumb.” Every moment of that afternoon walk, Dr. Johnson was our theme, and we capped one another with long quotations from Boswell. Jowett chirped, the Poet gave wonderful emphasis and point to the oracles, often pausing suddenly in his walk, and cross-examining me on my remembered version of the actual words. I noted the upshot of our talk. Lord Tennyson agreed with the Master of Balliol “that Boswell was a man of real genius, and resembled Goldsmith in many points of character.”

  Miss L —— , Doctor Johnson’s godchild, used to tell a disagreeable story about him. Tennyson said about this:

  T. “One should not lay stress on these oddities and angularities of great men. They should never be hawked about.”

  T. “‘Break, break’ was made one early summer morning, in a Lincolnshire lane. ‘Crossing the Bar’ cost me five minutes one day last November.”

  T. “At ten years of age I wrote an epic poem of great length — it was in the ‘Marmion’ style. I used to rush about the fields, with a stick for a sword, and fancied myself a conqueror advancing upon an enemy’s country.”

  T. “My prize poem ‘Timbuctoo’ was an altered version of a work I had written at home and called ‘The Battle of Armageddon.’ I fell out with my father, for I had no wish to compete for the prize and he insisted on my writing. To my amazement, the prize was awarded to me. I couldn’t face the public recitation in the Senate House, feeling very much as Cowper felt; Merivale declaimed my poem for me in the Senate House.”

  T. “Arthur Hallam said to me in 1832: ‘To-day I have seen the last English King going in State to the last English Parliament.’”

  I believe that one of Tennyson’s first idylls was addressed to Miss K. Bradshaw, sister of my beloved friend Henry Bradshaw (fellow and librarian of King’s College, Cambridge), whose relationship to the Judge who condemned Charles I. was rather a tender point with H. B., both at Eton and King’s.

  Because she bore the iron name

  Of him who doomed his king to die,

  I deemed her one of stately frame

  And looks to awe her stander by.

  But find a maiden, tender, shy,

  With fair blue eyes and winning sweet,

  And longed to kiss her hand, and lie

  A thousand summers at her feet.

  I pressed the Poet more than once to put on record his own interpretation of passages in “In Memoriam” and others which needed the authority of his own explanation. “Surely you took ‘four square to all the winds that blow’ from Dante’s

  Ben tetragono ai colpi della Ventura?”

  “No, it was not in my mind.” Again, I quoted his expression, “hollow shapes enclosing hearts of flame,” thinking it had arisen from Beckford’s Vathek. The answer was “No, merely spectral visions.”

  T. “Some of my poems depend on single sayings, single lines which have served me for a theme. My poem of ‘The Brigand’ is founded on a story told in the Autobiography of that great and gallant gentleman, Walter Scott.”

  T. “Edward FitzGerald and I used to weary of the hopelessly prosaic lines in some books of ‘The Excursion,’ and we had a contest, the prize for which was to be for the weakest line by mutual consent that we could either of us invent. FitzGerald declared the line was his — it really was mine—’A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.’” I wish I could have told hi
m of Jem Stephen’s commentary on “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” “That is no reason why we should lie about Heaven in our old age.” Among other passages he quotes with admiration Wordsworth’s lines on the “Simplon Pass.”

  T. “I am sorry that I am turned into a school-book at Harrow; the boys will say of me, ‘That horrible Tennyson.’ The cheapness of English classics makes the plan acceptable to schoolmasters and parents.”

  He quoted with approval Byron’s line —

  Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so.

  “He was quite right. I, too, was so overdosed with Horace as a boy, that I don’t do him justice now I am old. I suppose Horace was the most popular poet that ever lived?”

  Rough dissonant words in great poets were a trial to him; he declared that those horrid words, Eingeweide and Beschützer, are the ruin of Goethe’s otherwise perfect lyrics.

  T. “At Weimar the Grand Duchess sent an apology for not receiving me in person. After visiting Goethe’s study, bedroom and sitting-room, I was shocked by the meanness of the streets, and the horrid smells in the town itself. I felt as tetchy and vexed as Macbeth with his ‘out, out, brief candle,’ a passage so utterly misunderstood by Macready, who dropped his voice and gave the words a pathos that I am quite sure was never intended.”

  T. “The Tempest has been dreadfully damaged by scenes intercalated by some common stage-adapter. At one time of my life I thought the Sonnets greater than the Plays. Some of the noblest things are in Troilus and Cressida.”

  Perseverance, dear my Lord, keeps honour bright, etc.

  T. “Have you observed a solecism in Milton’s Penseroso?

  But let my due feet never fail

  To walk the studious cloisters pale,

  And love the high embowed roof

  With antique pillars massy proof, etc.”

  T. “I do not remember getting from your cousin Hartley Coleridge the Sonnet you speak of, still less can I account for its being in the Library in the South Kensington Museum.”

  This Sonnet is headed

  Sonnet to Alfred Tennyson

  After meeting him for the first time

  Long have I known thee as thou art in song,

  And long enjoyed the perfume that exhales

  From thy pure soul, and odour sweet entails,

  And permanence on thoughts that float along

  The stream of life to join the passive throng

  Of shades and echoes that are memory’s being,

  Hearing we hear not, and we see not seeing

  If Passion, Fancy, Faith, move not among

  The never frequent moments of reflection.

  Long have I view’d thee in the chrystal sphere

  Of verse, that like the Beryl makes appear

  Visions of hope, begot of recollection.

  Knowing thee now, a real earth-treading man

  Not less I love thee, and no more I can.

  Hartley Coleridge.

  T. “I liked Hartley Coleridge, ‘Massa’ Hartley’ as the rustics called him. He was a lovable little fellow. Once he said to me, ‘Had I been Colonel Burns (the Poet’s eldest son) I would have kicked Wordsworth for delivering that preachment.’ On one occasion Hartley, who was very eccentric, was asked to dine with the family of a stiff Presbyterian clergyman residing in the Lake district. The guests, Trappist fashion, sat a long time in the drawing-room waiting for the announcement of dinner. Not a word was uttered, and Hartley was bored to extinction. At last he suddenly jumped up from the sofa, kissed the clergyman’s wife, and rushed out of the house. He was wonderfully eloquent, and, I fancy, resembled his father in that respect.”

  T. “I doubt that fine poem ‘Kubla Khan’ having been written in sleep; I have often imagined new poems in my sleep, but I couldn’t remember them in the morning. Your uncle’s words: ‘Tennyson has no sense of rhythm and scansion,’ have been constantly quoted against me. The truth is that in my youth I used no hyphens in writing composite words, and a reader might fancy that from this omission I had no knowledge of the length and measure of words and expressions.”

  T. “Burns was a great genius, but dreadfully coarse sometimes. When he attempts to write in pure English, he breaks down utterly.” He quoted many things of Burns’s: “O my Luv’s like a red, red rose,” and “Gae fetch to me a pint o’ wine,” etc., with the greatest admiration, and “Mary Morison” and “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon,” etc. “They have utterly ruined the lilt of the last,” he said, “when they added words for the musical setting.”

  He was fond of talking about great pictures and fine sculpture. Birket Foster joined us one day, and Tennyson asked him to define the word “picturesque,” and to say why tumble-down cottages in the Isle of Wight were such favourite subjects with painters. B. F. answered that it was the breaking of the straight line. We talked of Frederick Walker, and B. F. told us many stories of his wit and conscientiousness. “I mean to paint a picture,” said he, “the key-note of which is to be onion-seed.”

  Primrose Day. — T. “All the floral displays for which we Isle of Wighters suffer are based on a mistaken version of the Queen’s meaning, when she sent a wreath of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield’s grave, inscribed with ‘His favourite flower.’ She meant Prince Albert’s, not Lord Beaconsfield’s partiality for the flower in question.”

  T. “I could imitate the hoot of an owl, and once practised successfully enough to attract one which flew in through my window. The bird soon made friends with me, would sit on my shoulder and kiss my face. My pet monkey became jealous, and one day pushed the owl off a board that I had had raised some feet from the ground. The owl was not hurt, but he died afterwards a Narcissus death from vanity. He fell into a tub of water contemplating his own beauty, and was drowned.”

  The Poet admired Carlyle’s French Revolution, but he seemed surprised at my having read Carlyle’s Frederick the Great; the length of it had been too much for him. I was vexed by the author’s omission of an account of Sebastian Bach’s famous interview with the king at Potsdam, and pressed on my old friend Sir George Grove to inquire the reasons of so strange an omission. He ascertained that Carlyle not only knew the fact, but the actual day and date of the occurrence. The omission, therefore, was really of malice aforethought. Quantz, the flute-player, has his appropriate niche in the monumental work, but the great Sebastian is out of it altogether; the tootler takes the cake and be hanged to him.

  Great sailors and soldiers were very favourite subjects. The Poet had personally known well one naval officer who had served with Nelson.

  T. “Among many odd letters I have received, an American curate wrote to me that he made a sudden resolution one Sunday that he would read ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ instead of his ordinary sermon. An old Dorsetshire soldier who had fought at Balaclava, happened to be in the congregation, though the preacher was unaware of the fact. The verses had the happy result of the soldier giving up a bad, reckless life, and completely reforming. My poem was never meant to convey any spiritual lesson, but the very curious fact of the chance soldier and the parson’s sudden resolution has often set me thinking.”

  T. “Twice, I am glad to say, I have been taken into battle; once by Sir Fenwick Williams of Kars; another officer wrote after a fight: ‘I escaped with my life and my Tennyson.’ I admire General Hamley, a good writer and accomplished soldier.”

  T. “When the Prince Regent explored the field of Waterloo with the Duke himself as guide, the Duke’s horse plunged and threw his rider. The Prince remarked, ‘I can now say what nobody else in the world can, that I saw the Duke of Wellington overthrown on the Field of Waterloo.’ His Grace was not over pleased with the observation.”

  T. “Keats would have become one of the very greatest of all poets, had he lived. At the time of his death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of development at the time. Each new effort was a steady advance on that which had go
ne before. With all Shelley’s splendid imagery and colour, I find a sort of tenuity in his poetry.”

  T. “‘Locksley Hall’ is thought by many to be an autobiographical sketch; it’s nothing of the sort — not a word of my history in it. Read FitzGerald’s Euphranor and let me know what you think of it.”

  One day we talked of Winchester and the rather meagre list of great men educated there. I rejoiced in the college boasting of an alumnus in Lord Seaton, the famous leader of the 52nd Regiment at Waterloo. “I remember,” T. said, “addressing a coachman by whose side I was sitting as we drove in a coach through that place, and I asked him, ‘What sort of a place is Winchester?’ Answer: ‘Debauched, sir, debauched, like all other Cathedral cities.’”

  T. “I am inclined to agree with Swinburne’s view of Mary Queen of Scots; she was brought up in a Court that studied the works of Brantôme.”

  We often talked of Farrar’s book and Maurice’s opinions on Eternal Punishment. The Poet was fond of quoting Dante’s line:

  Fecemi somma Sapienza ed il sommo Amore,

  insisting on Dante’s intense belief in a God of Love. He more than once repeated the famous lines of Moschus, adding, “I think those the finest lines in all Greek antiquity.”

  T. “My friend, Sir Henry Taylor, on being called a Christian Jupiter, remarked, ‘I wish I was much more of a jovial Christian.’”

  T. “I once asked Rogers, ‘Did you ever write a sonnet?’ He answered, ‘No, I never dance in fetters.’”

  T. “I am told that the best prose version of the Odyssey is by Professor Palmer of Cambridge University, America. Since Matthew Arnold’s lectures on Homer, a new translation has appeared annually in that country. It would take me ten years to translate the Iliad into Bible English.” He liked Worsley’s translation of the Odyssey.