Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  “The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land’s End.” (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)

  “Thackeray is the better artist, Dickens the [more affluent] Genius. He, like Hogarth, has the moral sublime sometimes: but not the ideal sublime. Perhaps I seem talking nonsense; I mean Hogarth could not conceive an Apollo or a Jupiter.” (Or Sigismunda. — E. F. G.)—”I think Hogarth greater than Dickens.”

  (Looking at an engraving of the Sistine Madonna in which only She and the Child, I think, were represented.)

  “Perhaps finer than the whole composition in so far as one’s eyes are more concentrated on the subject. The Child seems to me the furthest result of human art. His attitude is that of a man — his countenance a Jupiter’s — perhaps rather too much so.”

  (He afterwards said (1852) that his own little boy, Hallam, explained the expression of Raffaelle’s. He said he thought he had known Raffaelle before he went to Italy — but not Michael Angelo — not only Statues and Frescoes, but some picture (I think) of a Madonna “dragging a ton of a Child over her Shoulder.”)

  Seaford: December 27th-28th, 1852

  “Babies delight in being moved to and from anything: that is amusement to them. What a Life of Wonder — every object new. This morning he (his own little boy) worshipp’d the Bed-post when a gleam of sunshine lighted on it.”

  “I am afraid of him. It is a Man. Babes have an expression of grandeur that children lose. I used to think that the old Painters overdid the Expression and Dignity of their infant Christs: but I see they did not.”

  “I was struck at the Duke’s (Wellington’s) Funeral with the look of sober Manhood and Humanity in the British Soldiers.”

  (Of Laurence’s chalk drawing of — —’s head—”rather diplomatic than inhuman” — he said in fun. — E. F. G.)

  Brighton, 1852-1853

  “The finest Sea I have seen is at Valentia (Ireland), without any wind and seemingly without a Wave, but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind it, it dashes up into foam — blue diamond it looked like — all along the rocks — like ghosts playing at Hide and Seek.”

  (At some other time on the same subject.)

  “When I was in Cornwall it had blown a storm of wind and rain for days — all of a sudden fell into perfect calm; I was a little inland of the cliffs, when, after a space of perfect silence, a long roll of Thunder — from some wave rushing into a cavern, I suppose — came up from the Distance and died away. I never felt Silence like that.”

  “This” (looking from Brighton Pier) “is not a grand sea: only an angry curt sea. It seems to shriek as it recoils with its pebbles along the beach.”

  “The Earth has light of her own — so has Venus — perhaps all the other Planets — electrical light, or what we call Aurora. The light edge of the dark hemisphere of the moon — the ‘old Moon in the new Moon’s arms.’”

  “Nay, they say she has no atmosphere at all.”

  (I do not remember when this was said, nor whether I have exactly set it down; therefore must not make A. T. answerable for what he did not say, or for what after-discovery may have caused him to unsay. He had a powerful brain for Physics as for the Ideal. I remember his noticing that the forward-bending horns of some built-up mammal in the British Museum would never force its way through jungle, etc., and I observed on an after-visit that they had been altered accordingly.)

  “Sometimes I think Shakespeare’s Sonnets finer than his Plays — which is of course absurd. For it is the knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine.”

  “Do you think the Artist ever feels satisfied with his Song? Not with the Whole, I think; but perhaps the expression of parts.”

  (Standing one day with him looking at two busts — one of Dante, the other of Goethe, in a London shop, I asked, “What is wanting to make Goethe’s as fine as the other’s?”)

  “The Divine.” (“Edel sei der Mensch” was a poem in which he thought he found “The Divine.” — Ed.)

  (Taking up and reading some number of Pendennis at my lodging.) “It’s delicious — it’s so mature.”

  (Of Richardson’s Clarissa, etc.) “I love those great, still Books.”

  “What is it in Dryden? I always feel that he is greater than his works.” (Though he thought much of “Theodore and Honoria,” and quoted emphatically:

  More than a mile immerst within the wood.)

  “Two of the finest similes in poetry are Milton’s — that of the Fleet hanging in the air (Paradise Lost), and the gunpowder-like ‘So started up in his foul shape the Fiend.’ (Which latter A. T. used to enact with grim humour, from the crouching of the Toad to the Explosion.) Say what you please, I feel certain that Milton after Death shot up into some grim Archangel.” N.B. — He used in earlier days to do the sun coming out from a cloud, and returning into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting of eyes and lips, etc. And, with a great fluffing up of his hair into full wig, and elevation of cravat and collar, George the Fourth in as comical and wonderful a way.

  “I could not read through Palmerin of England, nor Amadis of Gaul, or any of those old romances — not even ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ though with so many fine things in it — But all strung together without Art.”

  Old Hallam had been speaking of Shakespeare as the greatest of men, etc. A. T. “Well, he was the Man one would have wished to introduce to another Planet as a sample of our kind.”

  Àpropos of physical stature, A. T. had been noticing how small Guizot looked beside old Hallam (when he went with Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay over the Houses of Parliament. — Ed.).

  “I was skating one day at full swing and came clash against a man of my own stature who was going at the same. We both fell asunder — got up — and laughed. Had we been short men we might have resented.”

  (I blamed some one for swearing at the servant girl in a lodging.) “I don’t know if women don’t like it from men: they think it shows Vigour.” (Not that he ever did so himself.)

  “There is a want of central dignity about him — he excuses himself, etc.”

  “Most great men write terse hands.”

  “I like those old Variorum Classics — all the Notes make the Text look precious.”

  (Of some dogmatic summary.) “That is the quick decision of a mind that sees half the truth.”

  TENNYSON AND THACKERAY by Lady Ritchie

  ... You ask me what I can remember of your Father and of mine in early days. I seem to know more than I actually remember....

  In looking over old letters and papers, I have found very few mentions of the many actual meetings between them, though again and again the Poet’s name is quoted and recorded, nor can I recall the time when I did not hear it spoken of with trust and admiring regard. To this day we possess “The Day Dream,” copied out from beginning to end in my Father’s writing.

  He was about twenty years of age when one day, in May 1832, he wrote down in his diary:

  Kemble and Hallam sat here for an hour. Read an article in Blackwood about A. Tennyson, abusing Hallam for his essay in The Englishman.

  Then again ...

  Kemble read me some very beautiful verses of Tennyson’s.

  And again:

  Found that B. and I did not at all agree about Tennyson. B. is a clever fellow nevertheless, and makes money by magazine writing, in which I should much desire to follow his example.

  After my Father’s marriage, when he was living in Coram Street, Tennyson and FitzGerald both came to see him there. In an old letter of my mother’s she describes Mr. Tennyson coming and my sitting at the table beside her in a tall chair and with a new pinafore for the occasion. FitzGerald, I think, also spoke of one of these meetings, and of my Father exclaiming suddenly, “My dear Alfred, you do talk d —— well.”

  As we grew up, the Tennyson books were a part of our household life. I can especially remember one volume, which came out when I was a little girl and which my Father lent to a friend, and I als
o remember his laughing vexation and annoyance when she returned the book all scored and defaced with absurd notes and marks of exclamation everywhere.

  I once published an article in an American magazine from which I venture to quote a passage which tells of one of the early meetings:

  I can remember vaguely, on one occasion through a cloud of smoke, looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet Laureate. He was sitting with my Father in the twilight after some family meal in the old house in Kensington; it was Tennyson himself who afterwards reminded me how upon this occasion, while my Father was speaking, my little sister looked up suddenly from the book over which she had been absorbed, saying, in her sweet childish voice, “Papa, why do you not write books like Nicholas Nickleby?” Then again, I seem to hear across that same familiar table, voices, without shape or name, talking and telling each other that Mr. Tennyson was married, that he and his wife had been met walking on the terrace at Clevedon Court, and then the clouds descend again, except, indeed, that I can still see my Father riding off on his brown cob to Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson’s house at Twickenham to attend the christening of Hallam their eldest son.

  Being themselves, when men, such as these two men, appreciate each other’s work, they know, with their great instinct for truth and directness, what to admire — smaller people are apt to admire the men rather than the work. When Tennyson and my Father met, it was as when knights meet in the field.

  How my Father appreciated the Idylls will be seen from the following letter, which came as an answer to his own:

  Farringford, I.W.

  My dear Thackeray — Should I not have answered you ere this 6th of November! surely; what excuse — none that I know of; except indeed that perhaps your very generosity — boundlessness of approval — made me in a measure shamefaced. I could scarcely accept it, being, I fancy, a modest man and always more or less doubtful of my own efforts in any line; but I may tell you that your little note gave me more pleasure than all the journals and monthlies and quarterlies which have come across me, not so much from being the Great Novelist, I hope, as from your being my good old friend — or perhaps of your being both of these in one. Well — let it be. I have been ransacking all sorts of old albums and scrap-books, but cannot find anything worthy sending you. Unfortunately, before your letter arrived, I had agreed to give Macmillan the only available poem I had by me. I don’t think he would have got it (for I dislike publishing in magazines), except that he had come to visit me in my island, and was sitting and blowing his weed vis-à-vis....

  Whenever you feel your brains as “the remainder biscuit,” or indeed whenever you will, come over to me and take a blow on these downs where the air, as Keats said, “is worth sixpence a pint,” and bring your girls too. — Yours always,

  A. Tennyson.

  I can remember all my Father’s pleasure when Alfred Tennyson gave him “Tithonus” for one of the early numbers of the Cornhill Magazine.

  He was once at Farringford, but this was before the time of the Cornhill.

  From America, where people store their kindly records and from whence so many echoes of the past are apt to reach us again, — some in worthy, and some, I fear, in less worthy voices, — I have received from time to time, the gift of an hour from the past, vivid and unalloyed. One day in the Century magazine, I came upon a page which retold for me the whole story of a happy hour and of my Father’s affectionate regard for that chivalrous American, Bayard Taylor, who came to see him, and for whom he had wished to do his best, by sending him to Farringford. All this came back to me when Alfred Tennyson’s letter was reproduced in the Century, his charming answer to my Father, and my Father’s own note in the margin.... Bayard Taylor himself has put the date to it all — June 1857.

  My Father writes to Bayard Taylor:

  My dear B. T. — I was so busy yesterday that I could not keep my agreeable appointment with Thompson, and am glad I didn’t fetch you to Greenwich. Here’s a note which concerns you and I am ever yours,

  W. M. T.

  The letter from Lord Tennyson runs as follows:

  Farringford, I.W.

  My dear Thackeray — Your American friend and poet-traveller has never arrived; he has, I suppose, changed his mind. I am sure I should have been very glad to see him, for my castle was never yet barricaded and entrenched against good fellows. I write now, this time to say that after the 30th I shall not be here.

  My best remembrances to your daughters, whom I have twice seen, once as little girls, and again a year or so back. — Yours ever,

  A. Tennyson.

  Afterwards Bayard Taylor found his way to Farringford, and he has written a happy account of the visit.

  I hardly know whether or not to give the record of a meeting which I myself remember. Once after a long visit to Freshwater I returned home to Palace Green, and hearing that Alfred Tennyson had come up soon after to stay for a few days at Little Holland House close by, I told my Father, and together we planned a visit, to which I eagerly looked forward, with much pride and youthful excitement. It was not far to walk, the high road leads straight to Holland House, in the grounds of which Little Holland House then stood among the trees. Mr. and Mrs. Prinsep were living there and Mr. Watts. When we reached the House and were let in, we saw Mr. Watts in his studio; he seemed to hesitate to admit us; then came the ladies. Mr. Tennyson was upstairs, we were told, not well. He had hurt his shin. “He did not wish for visitors, nevertheless certainly we were to go up,” they said, and we mounted into a side wing by some narrow staircase and came to a door, by which cans of water were standing in a row. As we entered, a man-servant came out of the little room.

  Tennyson was sitting in a chair with his leg up, evidently ill and out of spirits.

  “I am sorry to find you laid up,” said my Father.

  “They insisted upon my seeing the doctor for my leg,” said Alfred, “and he prescribed cold water dressing.”

  “Yes,” said my Father, “there’s nothing like it, I have tried it myself.”

  And then no more! No high conversation — no quotations — no recollections. After a minute or two of silence we came away. My tall Father tramped down the little wooden staircase followed by a bitterly disappointed audience.

  When I was writing that same magazine article from which I have already given an extract, I asked Edward FitzGerald if he could help me, and if I might quote anything from his letters and from Euphranor:

  “My dear Anne Ritchie” — Mr. FitzGerald wrote—”Your letter found me at Aldburgh on our coast where I come to hear my old sea talk to me, as more than sixty years ago, and to get a blow out on his back. Pray quote anything you please, provided with Alfred’s permission and no compliments to the author.

  “I do not think my fanfaron about him would be of any such service as you suppose; strangers usually take all that as the flourish of a friendly adviser, and would rather have some facts, such as that perhaps of his words about the Raphael and the little Hallam’s worship of the bed-post. I suppose it was in 1852 at Seaford near Brighton. I can swear absolutely and can now hear and see him as he said it; so don’t let him pretend to gainsay or modify that, whether he may choose to have it quoted or not.

  “Ah, I have often thought that I might have done some good service if I had kept to him and followed him and noted the fine true things which fell from his lips on every subject, practical or aesthetic, as they call it.

  “Bayard Taylor, in some essays lately published, quotes your Father saying that Tennyson was the wisest man he knew — which, by the way, would tell more in America than all I could write or say.

  “Your finding it hard to make an article about A. T. will excuse my inability to help you, as you asked. I did not know (as in the case of your Father also) where to begin or how to go on without a beginning. — Ever yours,

  E. F. G.”

  In 1863, just after our Father’s death, my sister and I came to Freshwater. It seemed to us that perhaps there more th
an anywhere else we might find some gleam of the light of our home, with the friend who had known him and belonged to his life and whom he trusted.

  We arrived late in the afternoon. It was bitter weather, the snow lying upon the ground. Mrs. Cameron had lent us a cottage, and the fires were already burning, and as we rested aimlessly in the twilight, we seemed aware of a tall figure standing in the window, wrapped in a heavy cloak, with a broad-brimmed hat. This was Tennyson, who had walked down to see us in silent sympathy.

  TENNYSON ON HIS FRIENDS OF LATER LIFE

  TO W. C. MACREADY

  1851

  Farewell, Macready, since to-night we part;

  Full-handed thunders often have confessed

  Thy power, well-used to move the public breast.

  We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.

  Farewell, Macready, since this night we part,

  Go, take thine honours home; rank with the best,

  Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest

  Who made a nation purer through their art.

  Thine is it that our drama did not die,

  Nor flicker down to brainless pantomime,

  And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see.

  Farewell, Macready; moral, grave, sublime;

  Our Shakespeare’s bland and universal eye

  Dwells pleased, through twice a hundred years, on thee.

  TO THE REV. F. D. MAURICE

  Come, when no graver cares employ,

  Godfather, come and see your boy:

  Your presence will be sun in winter,

  Making the little one leap for joy.

  For, being of that honest few,

  Who give the Fiend himself his due,

  Should eighty-thousand college-councils

  Thunder “Anathema,” friend, at you;

  Should all our churchmen foam in spite

  At you, so careful of the right,