Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  Tennant and I both got in our Essays, both in a very imperfect state, and both the last minute but one.... I find that Alford also wrote. So the Apostles have three chances. What Alford’s may be I do not know. But Tennant’s and mine are neither of them worth much: Tennant’s from dryness, mine from impertinence: for of all the impertinent things I ever wrote (and this is a bold word) my “Dissertatio Latina” was the most impertinent. It was in the form of a letter from Son Marcus to Father Cicero; cutting up the Offices in the most reverential way possible. The merit of it is, that if no prize is given at all I may fairly put it down to the novelty of the experiment and the nature of the Judges, whom to my horror I found out the day after to be the Heads of Colleges! Marry, God forbid! I rather calculated on Graham’s being one of the chief voters, who is fond of fun in general, and of my Latin in particular. However, it is no matter. I spent an amusing fortnight and improved my composition: and my mind is easy anyhow, which you will not easily believe.

  On June 21 he writes again:

  You will be glad to know that scoffing and utilizing march (like humanity according to the St. Simonians), and that Cicero the son has justified his parentage by getting the first prize for Latin composition. You will be sorry to hear that not Alford nor Tennant, but Hildyard Pet. hath obtained the second. Whether their labour has been lost I know not, but mine has been fairly paid, being at the rate of a guinea a day, and therefore 365 guineas a year, a very tolerable income, and I shall increase my establishment accordingly.... I wish you would decide, with your character, to come to Cambridge in the vacation and not stay by that dismal sea. There will be George Farish, and Edm. Lushington, and God knows whether Tennant, and do but add yourself to myself, and ourselves to the aforesaid: and lo you a select company as ever smoked under the shadow of a horse chesnut. If you do not come, you will simply be behind the world of the wise (which you know is as much like a goad as like a nail fastened by the master of an assembly) in the understanding of things spoken. For we talk out of the “Palace of Art” and the “Legend of Fair Women.” The great Alfred is here, i.e. in Southampton Row, smoking all the day, and we went from this house [14 Queen Square, Westminster] on a pilgrimage to see him; to wit, Two Heaths, my brother and myself, and, meeting Allen on the way, we took him along with us, and when we arrived at the place appointed we found A. T. and A. H. H. and J. M. K. So we made a goodly company, and did as we do at Cambridge, and, but that you were not among us, we should have been happy.

  Again, on the 18th of July:

  A new volume by A. T. is in preparation and will, I suppose, be out in Autumn. In the meantime I have no copy of the “Palace of Art,” but shall be happy to repeat it to you when you come, — no copy of the “Legend of Fair Women,” but can repeat about a dozen stanzas which are of the finest, — no copy of the conclusion of “Œnone” but one in pencil which no one but myself can read. The two concluding stanzas of “The Miller’s Daughter,” I can give you in this letter.... A broad smiling letter from John Heath commissions me this morning to engage Mrs. Perry’s lodgings for Dunbar, whereat I rejoice: also informs me that he himself keeps a Parroquet, and that Douglas has become a great Berkeleian, and would leave his body, like Jeremy Bentham’s, to be dissected, if he thought he had one.

  His brother Edward, who had been for some time in delicate health, died on the 24th of August 1832, and a few days later Spedding writes to Thompson:

  If you have seen Tennant you will be prepared to hear that my brother Edward died early on Friday morning, after above a month of severe suffering, leaving a ghastly vacancy in my prospects, not to be filled up. However, what is past — the profit and the pleasure which I have gathered out of long and pleasant years of brotherly society — this at least is safe, and is so much to be thankful for. Why should I be the sorrier because I have so long been graced with a source of comfort and of pride, which, if I had never known, I should now be as cheerful as when I last wrote to you? You knew him but little, but you knew him enough to form some notion of how much I have to regret — or, in other words, how much I have had to bless God for. He made a good and a Christian end, and it is ascertained by a post-mortem inspection that he could not possibly have had health for any length of time together. His disease was the formation of internal abscesses, in consequence of a failure of some of the membranes, and quite beyond the reach of surgery, so that, had one been at liberty to decide by a wish whether he should live or die, it would have been an act of unpardonable selfishness to wish him a moment more of captivity. This too is something to take off the bitterness of regret, which, however, in any way has no business to be bitter. But whether it is that I value high human friendship more highly than I ought to do, or whatever be the cause, a strange fatality seems to hang over the objects of my more especial esteem, and I would have you, Thompson, beware in time. But I shall lose my character with you if I do not take care. I hope you will communicate the news to Tennant and Farish, and to all our common friends, for explanations face to face are formidable things.

  It was the death of this brother that gave occasion to the verses “To J. S.” which Tennyson published in the volume then in course of preparation.

  In October 1832, after unsuccessfully sitting for a Fellowship, he decided upon another trial. Writing from Mirehouse to Thompson, he says:

  I find it impossible to read here, the valleys look so independent of circumstances. There stand the mountains, there lie the valleys, and there is that brook which thou hast made to take its pastime therein, a jolly old beck that has lately taken to worshipping its maker; for it overflowed and went into the church, turning us Christians out, or rather preventing us from going in — a better thing, inasmuch as prevention is better than cure.

  He was again unsuccessful, and Whiston was elected before him.

  In the spring of this year (1833) he had written to Thompson: “Hallam announces himself this morning as not otherwise than unwell.” He had long been delicate, and his early and sudden death at Vienna on the 15th of September came as a shock but not a surprise to his friends. There was a suggestion that his memory should be perpetuated by an inscription in the College Chapel, but it came to nothing. Spedding wrote to Thompson on November 18:

  Phillips has been consulting me and others as to the propriety and possibility of getting a tablet to Arthur Hallam’s memory erected in Trinity Chapel. Everybody approves cordially to whom he has communicated the proposal, and he now wishes it to be known among Hallam’s friends that such a plan is in contemplation, but privately and quietly. He will then get Christopher Wordsworth to get the Master’s permission, and then it will be time to think about the rest. It is just possible that there may be some College etiquette or other in the way, and it would be a pity in that case that the intention should have been talked about publicly. Will you communicate this to friends in Cambridge who may communicate with friends out of Cambridge, and so there will be little difficulty in letting every one know who is interested in the matter? Kemble can tell Trench, etc.; Merivale, Alford, etc. Who will write to Monteith, or send me his address? I will write to Donne myself. I think you must know every friend of Hallam’s whom I know. I have communicated with no one yet, except those in town. You will be able to do what is fitting better than I can tell you.

  The scheme came to nothing, for what reason we do not know; possibly “college etiquette,” as Spedding anticipated, might stand in the way, for Hallam was neither Fellow nor Scholar of the College.

  In the spring of 1834 Spedding was still at Mirehouse, and gives Thompson an account of a day and night he spent with Hartley Coleridge:

  The said Hartley is indeed a spirit of no common rate — his mind is brimful of rare and precious fancies, which leap out of him as fresh as a fountain in the sunshine. His biographical engagement with Bingley is for the present suspended, by his own fault, as he says. I suppose he could not stand it any longer. But the three first numbers are completed, and bound up in a goodly fat volume of 720 closely
printed pages. It contains twelve or fifteen lives, and more good things of all sorts and sizes than any other book of 720 pages. It is published by Bingley in Leeds and Whitaker in London, called Biographia Borealis, costs sixteen shillings, and the notes alone are worth the money. Wherefore, I pray you not only to get it yourself, but likewise to make everybody else get it. No apostolic bookcase should be without it. It should become a household book; therefore, let no one think of borrowing it, but whosoever is wise and good let him buy or steal it. If any man should ask what are the politics of the work (a question which no Apostle, who is indeed an Apostle, ever thought of asking but in the way of mere curiosity), then say thou, the same politics which were held in common by Plato, Demosthenes, Shakespeare, Bacon, Burke, and God Almighty, and let him make what he can of the information.

  Wordsworth’s eyes are better, but not well, nor ever likely to be. Reading inflames them and so does composing. I believe it was a series of Highland Sonnets that brought on the last attack, so much worse than any he had had before. He read me several that I had not seen nor heard before, many of them admirably good; also a long, romantic wizard and fairy poem, in the time of Merlin and King Arthur, very pretty, but not of the first order. But I should not have expected anything so good from him, which was so much out of his beat. He has not advanced much in his knowledge of Alfred; but he is very modest in his refusal to praise attributing his want of admiration to a deficiency in himself, whether from the stiffness of old age, which cannot accommodate itself to a new style of beauty, or that the compass of his sympathies has been narrowed by flowing too long and strongly in one direction. (N.B. He is not answerable for the English that I am writing.) But he doubts not that Alfred’s style has its own beauty, though he wants the faculty to enter fully into it, alleging as a parallel case the choruses in “Samson Agonistes” the measure of which he has never been able to enjoy, which comes to perhaps as high a compliment as a negative compliment can be. He spoke so wisely and graciously that I had half a mind to try him with a poem or two, but that would have been more perhaps than he meant. And indeed it is always so pleasant to hear a distinguished man unaffectedly disclaiming the office of censor, that I never think it fair to take him at his word. I have given a copy of Alfred’s second volume to Hartley Coleridge, who, I trust, will make more of it. He had only seen it for a few minutes, and was greatly behind the age, though he admitted that A. T. was undoubtedly a man of genius; and was going to say something about the Quarterly in a Review of The Doctor, which he was, or is, writing for Blackwood. I also sent him yesterday a copy of Charles Tennyson, accompanied with one of my most gentlemanly letters.

  Spedding was now nearly six-and-twenty, and had no settled plan of life before him. “For myself,” he says, “I am unsettled in all my prospects and plans. I am, in fact, doing nothing, but I flatter myself I am pausing on the brink to take a good look at the different ways of life which are open to me before I take the fatal plunge.”

  At the end of 1834 he invited Thompson, who was then at York, to visit him at Mirehouse.

  Excuses shall not be admitted, at least not such as yours. Is there not a stage-coach which fears God, and do you for that reason refuse to employ it? You ought rather to encourage it. What is a little bile or rheumatism, compared with the advancement of Truth, and the conservation of the Faith that is on the earth? Moreover, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a coach leaves Kendal at 8 o’clock in the morning, and arrives in Keswick about one, having traversed in the short space of five hours many miles of the finest scenery in the country, containing both other things and five lakes, and the dwelling-places of Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge, and Hamilton (more commonly known as Cyril Thornton). As for your time lost last term, that I know, from my experience of your character, to be a fiction of modesty: and as for your hopes of making up for it at home, that I know, from my experience of my own character, to be humbug. Besides, you write as one balancing his own desires according to a principle of enlightened self-interest. You forget that it is not for your own pleasure, but for my profit, that I ask you to come. Am I not sliding daily from bad to worse? Am I not losing the race I do not run? Am I not learning to look on all knowledge as vanity, all labour as sorrow? for not the knowledge for which men labour is profitable, but the labour only, and yet who can labour for that which profiteth not? Have I not already parted with the hope, and am I not now parting with the wish, to advance? Am I performing any duty? Am I making any money? Am I not falling away from the Apostolic mind, notwithstanding? Am I not taking pleasure in the shooting of snipes? Am I not in danger of having a bad German pronunciation for evermore? Roll these things in your mind, and then roll yourself into the coach. I will meet you at Ambleside, if you like.

  I had read the review of Wordsworth several times over: and thought the criticism (except. excipiend.) good, and the moral philosophy superb. The passage about the moon looking round her, etc., I of course felt to be a blunder, though I was less surprised than sorry to see it. It seems to me to chime in too well with what I marked as the defect of his preface to P. v. A., so that I fear it is not a negligent criticism, as one might have hoped: but an opinion well weighed and carefully adopted. I wonder what he would say to Ebenezer Elliott, with his flowers and mountains, for a taste?

  Welcome then again

  Love-listening Primrose! tho’ not parted long

  We meet like lovers after years of pain.

  Oh thou bringst blissful childhood back to me,

  Thou still art loveliest in the lowest place,

  Still as of old Day glows with love for thee,

  And reads our heavenly Father in thy face.

  Surely thy thoughts are humble and devout,

  Flower of the pensive gold! for why should heaven

  Deny to thee his noblest boon of thought,

  If to Earth’s demigods ‘tis vainly given?

  Answer me, Sunless Sister, Thou hast speech

  Though silent Fragrance is thy eloquence,

  Beauty thy language, and thy smile might teach

  Ungrateful man to pardon providence.

  He would call it a very bold figure of speech: figure of speech, quotha! However, Philip is a noble fellow, and the apology for this piece of criticism is so wise and so good that one can hardly regret that an apology was needed. I have sent for the citation of Will. Shakespeare, though rather with the desire than the expectation of great delight. I read a few extracts in the Atlas, with which I was not at all struck, or, if at all, not favourably; but that does not go for much, as I did not know who it was by, or anything about it, and the extracts were most probably ill-chosen. But to tell you the truth I never took much to Landor. To be sure I never read much of him, but I have often had the book in my hand. Perhaps I might have liked him better if the speakers had been named Philander and Strephon, and Philalethes and the like, instead of Bacon, and Hooker, and Raleigh, and so following. I shall have every chance this time: for besides the prejudice derived from your praise, I am by no means easy in feeling no great respect for a writer of whom P. v. A. speaks so very highly. There is something in Philip’s intellect which commands more than my usual reverence. More genial minds I have met with, but for strength, and integrity, and discretion of understanding, I do not know his equal. He puts me in mind of F. Malkin. We must have him change his mind, though, about the moon and the streams. I read the review of Coleridge in the Quarterly the other day. The parts which are not Coleridge’s own might have been better, but they are well enough.

  The spring of 1835 was memorable at Mirehouse for a visit of Tennyson and FitzGerald. That this made a vivid impression on FitzGerald is evident from a letter which he wrote after Spedding’s death to his niece, when there was some idea of gathering together his miscellaneous essays:

  “I rejoice,” he says, “to hear of a Collection, or Reprint, of his stray works.... I used to say he wrote ‘Virgilian Prose.’ One only of his I did not care for; but that, I doubt not, was because of the s
ubject, not of the treatment: his own printed Report of a Speech he made in what was called the ‘Quinquaginta Club’ Debating Society (not the Union) at Cambridge about the year 1831. This speech his Father got him to recall and recompose in Print; wishing always that his Son should turn his faculties to such public Topics rather than to the Poets, of whom he had seen enough in Cumberland not to have much regard for: Shelley for one, at one time stalking about the mountains with Pistols, and other such Vagaries. I do not think he was much an admirer of Wordsworth (I don’t know about Southey), and I well remember that when I was at Merehouse (as Miss Bristowe would have us call it), with A. Tennyson in 1835, Mr. Spedding grudged his Son’s giving up much time and thought to consultations about Morte d’Arthur’s, Lords of Burleigh, etc., which were then in MS. He more than once questioned me, who was sometimes present at the meetings, ‘Well, Mr. F., and what is it? Mr. Tennyson reads, and Jem criticizes: — is that it?’ etc. This, while I might be playing Chess with dear Mrs. Spedding, in May, while the Daffodils were dancing outside the Hall door.”