I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the Bar.
TENNYSON AND SIR JOHN SIMEON, AND TENNYSON’S LAST YEARS by Louisa E. Ward
From the misty dawn of early childhood rises the first image of one who was to fill so large a place in my life and that of those dear to me. As I, not yet four years old, lay in my father’s arms and he said to me the “Morte d’Arthur,” there blended with the picture of the wild winter mere and the mighty King carried, dying, to its shore, a vision of the man who, my father told me, lived somewhere amongst us and who could write words which seemed to me more beautiful than anything I had ever heard.
It was several years before I again came upon the “Morte d’Arthur,” when I was a girl of ten or eleven, and I remember how eagerly I seized upon it, and how the fairy glamour of my infancy came back to me as I read it.
It was in the autumn of 1852 that Lord and Lady (then Mr. and Mrs.) Tennyson came to Farringford. They had been looking for a house, and they found themselves one summer evening on the terrace walk, with the rosy sunset lighting up the long line of coast to St. Catherine’s Point, and the gold-blue sea with its faint surf line mingling with the rosiness: and they said, “We will go no further, this must be our home.” An ideal home it was, ideal in its loveliness, its repose, in its wild but beautiful gardens, and more than all ideal in its calm serenity, the hospitable simplicity, the high thought and utter nobleness of aim and life which that pair brought with them, and which through the long years of change, of sickness, and of sorrow, of which every home must be the scene, made the atmosphere of Farringford impossible to be forgotten by those who had the happiness of breathing it.
The Corner of the Study at Farringford where Tennyson wrote, with his Deerhound “Lufra” and the Terrier “Winks” in the Foreground. From a drawing by W. Biscombe Gardner.
Hallam was at that time a baby, and very soon after their arrival at Farringford beautiful Lionel came to gladden the hearts of his parents. It was on the day of Lionel’s christening that my father paid his first visit to Farringford, and found the family party just returning from church. My father had already been introduced to Tennyson at Lady Ashburton’s house in London, on which occasion he had walked away with Carlyle and had expressed to him his pleasure at meeting so great a man as Tennyson. “Great man,” said Carlyle, “yes, he is nearly a great man, but not quite; he stands on a dunghill with yelping dogs about him, and if he were quite a great man, he would call down fire from Heaven, and burn them up”—”but,” he went on, speaking of his poetry, “he has the grip on it.”
My father had entertained the greatest admiration for Tennyson’s poetry since the day when, both being undergraduates at Christchurch, his friend Charles Wynne brought him the first published volume, saying to him, “There is something new for you who love poetry.” And his delight may be imagined in now having the Poet for a neighbour. The intimacy between Farringford and Swainston grew apace. My mother and Lady Tennyson, though poor health and numerous occupations interfered with their frequent meetings, conceived a very real affection for each other, which was only cut short by my mother’s early death, which left Lady Tennyson with a deep feeling and pity for her children.
During the early years of Farringford, it was one of my father’s great and frequent pleasures to ride or drive over in the summer afternoons; he, in turn with her husband, would draw Lady Tennyson in her garden chair, and with the two boys skipping on before them, they would go long expeditions through the lanes, and even up the downs; then back through the soft evening air to dinner, and the long evening of talk and reading which knitted that “fair companionship” and made of it “such a friendship as had mastered time,” and which we may well believe has re-formed itself still more perfectly now that both those beloved souls have “crossed the bar.” The Tennysons sometimes came over to Swainston for a few days, and I remember his being there on the wonderful July night in 1858 when the tail of the great comet passed over Arcturus. His admiration and excitement knew no bounds; he could not sit at the dinner-table, but rushed out perpetually to look at the glorious sight, repeating: “It is a besom of destruction sweeping the sky.”
Little Lionel was that same night taken from his bed to the window, and, opening his sleepy eyes on the unaccustomed splendour, he said, “Am I in Heaven?”
The writing and publication of “Maud” in 1855 was largely due to my father.
Looking through some papers one day at Farringford with his friend, he came upon the exquisite lyric “O that ‘twere possible,” and said, “Why do you keep these beautiful lines unpublished?” Tennyson told him that the poem had appeared years before in the Tribute, an ephemeral publication, but that it was really intended to belong to a dramatic poem which he had never been able to carry out. My father gave him no peace till he had persuaded him to set about the poem, and not very long after, he put “Maud” into his hand.
It was about this time, but I do not remember what year, that Tennyson gave my father the manuscript of “In Memoriam.” He had often asked him to give him a manuscript poem, and he had put him off, but one day at Swainston he asked my father to reach him a particular book from a shelf in the library, and as he did so, down fell the MS. which Tennyson had put there as a surprise. Never was gift more valued and appreciated by its recipient. I have always felt grateful to him for the continual pleasure which it gave my father during the whole of his life.
Tennyson’s visits were eagerly looked forward to by us children. He would talk to us a good deal, and was fond of puzzling and mystifying us in a way that was very fascinating. He would take the younger ones on his knee, and give them sips of his port after dinner, and I remember my father saying to one of my sisters: “Never forget that the greatest of poets has kissed you and made you drink from his glass.”
As I got older I was sometimes allowed to drive over to Farringford with my father, and, need I say, I looked forward to these as the red-letter days of my life. Not only were the talk and intellectual atmosphere intoxicating to me, but I became passionately attached to Lady Tennyson. Praise of her would be unseemly; but I may quote what my father was fond of saying of her, that she was “a piece of the finest china, the mould of which had been broken as soon as she was made.” It was not, however, till after my mother’s death in 1860 that my real grown-up intimacy with them began, and that Farringford became the almost second home which for some years it was to me. During my father’s absences in London or elsewhere, I was free to go and stay there as often and for as long as I liked, and was almost on the footing of a daughter of the house. I used to go for long walks, sometimes alone with Tennyson, sometimes in the company of other guests, of whom Mr. Jowett was one of the most frequent. I wish I had written down the talks with which he made the hours pass like minutes during our walks. Forgetful of the youth and ignorance of his companion, he would rise to the highest themes, thread his way through the deepest speculations, till I caught the infection of his mind, and the questions of matter and spirit, of space and the infinite, of time and of eternity, and such kindred subjects, became to me the burning questions, the supreme interests of life! But however absorbed he might be in earnest talk, his eye and ear were always alive to the natural objects around him: I have known him stop short in a sentence to listen to a blackbird’s song, to watch the sunlight glint on a butterfly’s wing, or to examine a field flower at his feet. The lines on “The Flower” were the result of an investigation of the “love-in-idleness” growing on a wall in the Farringford garden. He made them nearly on the spot, and said them to me next day. Trees and plants had a special attraction for him, and he longed to see the vegetation of the Tropics. Years ago he scolded my husband more than half in earnest for not having told him in time that he was going to winter in Madeira, that he might have gone with him.
But to return to my girlish days at Farringford! The afternoon walks were followed by the long talks in the firelight by the side of Lady Tennyson’s sofa,
talks less eager, less thrilling than those I have recalled; but so helpful, so tender, full of the wisdom of one who had learnt to look upon life and all it embraces from one standpoint only, and that the very highest! Then dinner with the two boys (their long fair hair hanging over their shoulders and their picturesque dresses as they are seen in Mr. Watts’s picture in the drawing-room at Aldworth) waiting as little pages on the guests at table, followed by the delightful dessert, for which, according to the old College fashion, we adjourned to the drawing-room. The meal was seasoned with merry genial talk, unexpected guests arriving, and always finding the same warm welcome, for none came who were not tried and trusted friends. After dessert Tennyson went up to his study (the little room at the top of the house, from the leads outside which such sky pageants have been seen, shooting stars, eclipses, and Northern Lights) with any men friends who were in the house. They smoked there for an hour or two, and then came down to tea, unless, as sometimes happened, we all joined them upstairs; and then there was more talk or reading aloud of published or, still better, unpublished poems. He would sometimes read from other poets; Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and some lyrics of Campbell being what he often chose; and he taught me to know and appreciate Crabbe, whom he placed very high in the rank of English poets.
One day Tennyson came behind me as I sat at breakfast, and dropped on my plate the MS. of the “Higher Pantheism” which he had composed, or at any rate perfected, during the night. Another day he took me into the garden to see a smoking yew, and said the lines on it which he had just made and afterwards interpolated in “In Memoriam.” My father was with him when they came upon a bed of forget-me-not in the garden and he exclaimed “the heavens upbreaking through the earth,” the lines which he afterwards applied to the bluebells in the description of the spring ride of Guinevere and Lancelot to Arthur’s court. Once he pleased and touched me inexpressibly: he was talking of the different way in which friends speak before your face and behind your back, and he said, “Now I should not mind being behind the curtain while L. S. was talking of me, and there are very few of whom I could say that.”
Years went on, and changes came; my father’s re-election to Parliament in 1865 made our seasons in London longer and more regular than they had been, and though there was still constant and delightful intercourse with Farringford during the autumn and winter, there was necessarily less during the Session. Some glorious days there were, however, when at Easter or at Whitsuntide my father went down to Swainston, and I sometimes accompanied him. We always went over to Farringford either to spend a night or two, or to drive back through the spring night with its scented breath and its mad revelry of cuckoos and nightingales vying with each other as to which could outshout the other, and my father, fresh from communion with his friend, would open himself out as he rarely did at any other time or place.
It was about this time that Tennyson and his wife, worried beyond bearing by the rudeness and vulgarity of the tourists, who considered that they could best show admiration for the Poet by entirely refusing to respect his privacy, determined to find another house for themselves during the summer months, and turned their thoughts to Blackdown and its neighbourhood. One summer they rented a farm on Blackdown called, I think, Greyshott, and on a fine morning, April 23, 1868, we stood, a party of some fifteen friends, to see the foundation-stone laid of Aldworth, the new home which, to more recent, though not to the older friends, has become almost as much associated with its owner as Farringford, and received the sorrowful consecration of having been the scene of his passing away.
About this time Tennyson took to coming oftener to London. On one occasion he took me with him to the British Museum, and we did not get beyond the Elgin Marbles, such was their fascination for him. Another day he came to our house at luncheon time; most of the family happened to be out, and he proposed that we should go to the Zoological Gardens. London was at its fullest, and I feared, though I did not say it, that he would not escape recognition, which was of all things what he most hated. However, all went well for some time until we went into the Aquarium, and he became greatly absorbed in the sea monsters, when I heard a whisper in the crowd, “That’s Tennyson,” and knew that in another minute he would be surrounded; so I suddenly discovered that the heat of the Aquarium was unbearable and carried him off unwillingly to a quieter part of the gardens — he never found out my ruse.
My mind lingers willingly on the last years of the sixties. As I look back the two-and-twenty years seem, as did another “two and thirty years,” a “mist that rolls away.” Of the circle of dear friends who were so much to one another some still remain to gladden us with their presence, but how many have gone where “beyond these voices there is peace” — Mr. George Venables, Mr. John Ball, Mr. Browning, Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Brookfield, Mr. Henry Cowper, Mr. Laurence Oliphant. The circle was complete as the Table of Arthur before the fatal quest had made its gaps; here death was the quest, and each one who sought, alas, has found it!
The first to pass away was my father, and as his best friend walked in the garden at Swainston on the day, May 31, 1870, on which he came to see him laid to rest, he made those verses, than which few lovelier tributes were ever paid from friend to friend, and which will keep the name of the “Prince of Courtesy” green even in the long years to come.
The autumn and winter ‘71-’72 my eldest brother and I spent together at Freshwater. We rented Mrs. Cameron’s little house which opens by a door of communication into the large hall of Dimbola, the house in which she lived. The evening we arrived, she suddenly appeared in our drawing-room saying, “When strangers take this house I keep the door between us locked, with friends never”; and locked it never was. We lived almost as part of the family, and it was a real enjoyment to be in such close intimacy with one of the most original, and at the same time most tender-hearted and generous women I have ever known. She was on very intimate terms at Farringford, and would speak her mind to the Poet in a very amusing way. On one occasion a party of Americans came to Freshwater, and Mrs. Cameron sent them up to Farringford with a note of introduction. Tennyson was tired or busy, and they were not admitted. They returned to Mrs. Cameron full of their disappointment, and she put on her bonnet (I can see her now as she walked through the lanes, her red or blue Chuddah shawl always trailing behind her, and apparently not much the worse for the dust that fringed it), and insisted upon their going back with her to Farringford. Having made her way to Tennyson, she said to him solemnly, “Alfred, these good people have come 3000 miles to see a lion and they have found a bear.” He laughed, relented, and received the strangers most courteously.
Mrs. Cameron’s beautiful white-haired old husband in his royal purple dressing-gown was a most interesting personality. In addition to the large experience of men and things which his many years of official life in India had given him, and which made his society delightful, he was a very fine classical scholar of the old school, and in his old age, when blindness and infirmity debarred him in great measure from his books, it was his solace to repeat by heart odes of Horace, pages of Virgil, and long passages from the Greek poets.
Easter 1872 brought a bright and merry gathering to Freshwater. One of Mrs. Cameron’s charming relations (they had lived with her for years as adopted daughters) was about to marry, and go out with her husband to India, and the “Primrose wedding” brought a large influx of young people, friends and relations of Mrs. Cameron and the bride, in addition to the visitors who always made Easter a pleasant time. The weather was perfect, the “April airs that fan the Isle of Wight” especially soft and balmy. Parties of twenty or thirty met every evening in Mrs. Cameron’s hall or in the Farringford drawing-room. Nearly every one there knew or got to know Lord and Lady Tennyson. He was in particularly genial health and spirits; he joined the young people in their midnight walks to the sea, in their flower-seeking expeditions, in one of which some one was fortunate enough to find a grape hyacinth in one of the Farringford fields. He read aloud nearly as mu
ch as he was asked to, and danced as vigorously as the youngest present at two dances that were given. It was during the first of these dances that a young neighbour became engaged to the lady whom he shortly afterwards married. Very soon after the decisive moment had passed, and when the event was naturally supposed to be a profound secret, Tennyson put the girl’s mother, with whom he happened to be sitting, completely out of countenance by saying, without a suspicion of malice, and without for the moment recognizing the young couple who passed him, “I wot they be two lovyers dear.” When he was shortly afterwards told of the engagement, he twinkled very much over his rather premature but very apposite announcement.
My marriage took place in the autumn of 1872, and my husband, who already knew the Tennysons, was at once received into their intimacy, and their friendship was henceforth one of the greatest privileges of our joint life. Tennyson and Hallam were present at our wedding, and the former held our eldest boy in his arms when he was but a day or two old.
The Easter of 1873 saw us again at Freshwater with another pleasant meeting of friends. On that occasion Tennyson said to me, “Why do you not ask me to dinner?” It need not be said that we at once gave the invitation, though not a little nervous at the thought of the lodging-house fare and arrangements to which we were bidding him; but our dear old landlady did her very best. We asked a small party (Lady Florence Herbert and Leslie Stephen were our guests) to meet him and Hallam; he was himself in the best of spirits, and our little dinner-party proved a great success.
A few years later the Tennysons took a house in London three or four years running (one spring they had my stepmother’s house in Eaton Place). Tennyson appeared to have in great measure lost his dislike to mixing in general society, and they collected about them a very interesting and varied circle of friends. I cannot help recalling an incident which occurred one evening at their house, which, though painful at the moment, is pleasant to look back upon on account of the affectionate and generous apology it elicited. A large party was at their house one evening, and Tennyson was persuaded to read aloud, and chose the “Revenge.” Something or other, I suppose the “Inquisition Dogs” and the “Devildoms of Spain,” excited him as he read, and by the time he had finished he had worked himself into a state, which I have occasionally, but seldom, seen at other times, of fury against the Catholic Church, as exemplified by the Inquisition, persecution of heretics, etc.; in fact, all the artillery of prejudice at which Catholics can afford to laugh. It happened, however, that my husband, one of my sisters, and myself were the only Catholics there, and were sitting together in the same part of the room. As he talked he turned towards us and addressed us personally in a violent tirade which loyalty to our convictions made it impossible for us not to answer, though our attempts at explanation and contradiction were drowned in his fierce and eloquent denunciations. Every one in the room looked very uncomfortable. I myself hardly knew whether to laugh or cry, and was never more relieved than, when his flow of words had exhausted itself, he began to read another poem. Before the end of the evening, however, he felt that his outbreak had not been kind or courteous, and before we left he took us all three into his study, and made so sweet and gracious an amende that we loved him, if possible, more than ever.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series Page 212