Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  The friendship thus preluded was to last until death closed it. The record of it lies here in old diaries and in sheaves of letters, faithfully treasured; a chronicle of some forty years with all the little troubles, the joys and sorrows of the two households, intimately shared. It was a four-cornered friendship, one of husband and wife with husband and wife, but the correspondence passed almost entirely between the wives. Men had already for the most part abandoned the practice of letter-writing outside their business and families, but at the little rosewood drawing-room escritoires at which we of the many documents are tempted to smile, Victorian women fed the flame of friendship with — here the metaphor becomes a little mixed — a constant flow of ink. Not that the two women who kept up this correspondence were idle. All that Emily Tennyson on her invalid sofa did for her Poet, is it not written in the book of his Biography? Her friend, Marian Bradley, was yet busier than she, having the cares and duties of a mother of a large family, besides those incident to the wife of a man who was successively Head Master of a great school, Head of an Oxford College, and Dean of Westminster.

  Granville Bradley was twelve years younger than Alfred Tennyson; an interval in age which permits at once of veneration and of intimacy. It was at the Lushingtons’ house that my father, as an undergraduate of one-and-twenty, first met the young Poet, and became his admirer; but it was not until twelve years later that the admirer became also the friend.

  My mother tells in her diary how in that summer of the birthday meeting, the two men roamed the country together, poetizing, botanizing, geologizing. The enthusiasm of science had begun to seize on all thinking humanity, and if botany was considered the only suitable science for ladies, geology had something like a boom among the privileged males. I can see my father now, a slight, active little figure, armed with a hammer and girt with a capacious knapsack, setting forth joyous as a chamois-hunter, for a day’s sport among the fossils of the Isle of Wight cliffs. But above all it was the communion of spirit, the play of ideas which interested the two and drew them together. “They talked from 12 noon to 10 P.M., almost incessantly, this day,” writes my mother, “Tennyson walking back with him (some three miles) to the Warren farm, still talking.”

  One pictures the tall, long-cloaked Bard and the vivacious little scholar pacing side by side, inconscient of time and distance, down the shingly drive of Farringford, through the warm and dusky night of the deep-hedged lanes, overhung with the heavy darkness of August trees, until they came out on the clear pale spaces of the open seaward land, and the whisper and scent of the sea. And one would guess this to be a picture of two very young men, absorbed in the first joy of one of the romantic friendships of youth, did one not know that the Poet was a man of middle age and the scholar in the maturing thirties. But the artists know their way to the Fountain of youth and meet there. Tennyson, the great creative artist, retained all his life the simplicity of a child. My father was no creator, but he, too, was in his way an artist; he was the artist as scholar and teacher. Language and Style were to him things almost as splendid and sacred as they were wont to be to a Renaissance scholar, and sins against them roused the only bad passions of an otherwise sweet nature. History to him was not history, it was real life; the rhythm and harmony of poetry were what music is to the ardent music-lover. From childhood to old age he was for ever crooning some favourite fragment of verse. With what delight, then, he found himself crossing the threshold of a great poet’s mind; the mind of one who did not, so to speak, keep his friends waiting in the vestibule, but opened to them freely the palace chambers, rich with the treasures of his knowledge, thought, and imagination.

  Those passages in my mother’s diary in which she speaks of the happiness it gave my father and herself to make acquaintance with the Poet, and to find him just what they would have wished him to be, have already appeared in the Biography. Also her description of those evenings in the Farringford drawing-room, so often recurring and through so many years, when he would “talk of what was in his heart,” or read aloud some poem, often yet unpublished, while they listened, looking out on the lovely landscape and the glimpse of sea which, “framed in the dark-arched bow-window,” seemed, like some beautiful picture, almost to form part of the room.

  My father now bought a small estate between Yarmouth and Freshwater, and built a house — Heathfield — upon it, in which to spend his holidays. The Freshwater side of the Isle of Wight was not at that time a fashionable neighbourhood. The lovely, lonely bays on the blue Solent, innocent of lodging-house or bathing-machine, succeeded each other from Yarmouth to the Needles. They were approached over open land, or by little stony chines, deep in gorse and bracken, down which tiny streams trickled, to spread themselves out shiningly on the sands and melt into the sea. I remember my young mother killing a red adder in our chine with a well-aimed stone, as we came up from our morning dip in the waves. There was room for wild creatures and open country and for poetry then on the little island. The islanders, smugglers from generation to generation, had in them more of the wild creature than of poetry. Droll stories used to be told of their inability to appreciate the honour done to Freshwater by the Poet’s residence there. But perhaps the days when his “greatness” was measured by the man-servant test were more comfortable days for the Bard than those when his movements were marked and followed through telescopes.

  There was a constant coming and going between Heathfield and Farringford, the children of each house being equally at home in the other. I see now the long Farringford drawing-room, full of the green shade of a cedar tree which grew near the great window, and the slight figure of Lady Tennyson rising from the red sofa — it was a red room — and gliding towards my mother with a smile upon her lips. She always wore a soft gray cashmere gown, and it was always made in the same simple fashion; much as dresses were worn in the days of Cruikshank, only that the gathered skirt was longer and less full than the skirts of Cruikshank’s ladies. Her silky auburn-brown hair, partly hidden by lace lappets, was untouched with gray, and her complexion kept its rose-leaf delicacy, just as her strong and cultivated intellect kept its alertness, to the last days of her life. No sooner were the greetings over than ten to one the door would open, and the Poet would come slowly, softly, silently, into the room, dressed in an old-fashioned black tail-coat, and fixing my mother with his distant short-sighted gaze. One day, she being seated with her back to the cedar-green window, he approached her with such extreme deference, and so solemn a courtesy, as made her all amazed; until in a minute, with a flash of amusement, both discovered that he had mistaken her for — the Queen. Still more surely one or both of the long-haired, gray-tunicked boys would appear, less silently; and away the children scampered to their endless play about the rambling house and grounds. But even the children’s play was informed with the vital interest of the two houses: the story of King Arthur and his knights. The first “Idylls of the King” had appeared, and others were appearing. It was a red-letter evening indeed when Poet and new poem were ready for a reading, either in the little upstairs study, or in the drawing-room, where dessert was always laid after dinner, and he sat at the head of the round table in a high carved chair. Country life was in those days very simple and dinners early, so that even young children appeared with the dessert, and my mother’s description of those evenings recalls very clearly some of the earliest of the pictures in memory’s picture-book, as well as some later ones. I remember now a story of Tennyson’s which tickled my childish sense of humour exceedingly, the point of it lying in a bit of bad French, the badness of which I could appreciate. My father had a vein of dry humour, which being akin to that of the Poet, doubtless assisted to knit the bonds of friendship, since to find the same thing humorous is almost essential to real intimacy. There was between the two the natural give-and-take of friendship, and to the warm appreciation given as well as received, Emily Tennyson’s letters bear constant witness. “Mr. Bradley’s intellectual activity, so warmed by the heart, is very good for my
Ally,” she writes; and again: “I know you would be pleased if you could hear Ally recur to his talks with Mr. Bradley, and one particular talk about the Resurrection and [illegible]. It is difficult to express admiration, so I won’t say any more, except God bless you both.”

  My father was now in the full stress of his great work at Marlborough, and spent his summer holidays for the most part in Switzerland, but Christmas and Easter still often found us at Freshwater. In 1866 Tennyson’s eldest son, Hallam, was sent to school at Marlborough. “I am not sending my son to Marlborough — I am sending him to Bradley,” he said in reply to the Queen’s question. On another occasion he said: “I am sending him to Marlborough because Bradley is a friend of mine, and Stanley tells me that Marlborough is the best school in England.” There followed three visits to Marlborough during the four years longer that my father remained there. The second one, when Lady Tennyson came with her husband, was brought about by the severe illness of the cherished son, and lasted seven weeks. At first the anxiety about the boy was too great to admit of pleasure either to them or to my parents, to whom — especially to my mother — Hallam was almost as a son of their own. But later, and during the Poet’s other visits, there were walks and drives in Savernake forest, beautiful at all seasons of the year, and over the windy spaces of the gray silent downland, where “the chronicles of wasted Time” are written in worn and mysterious hieroglyphs of stone, and fosse, and hillock. During the first visit “The Victim” was written by him in the room called the green dressing-room, looking out on the clipped yews and tall lime-circle of Lady Hertford’s old garden. In summer-time he had great pleasure in the peaceful beauty of Marlborough and its landscape, and also in the wealth of flowers with which my mother surrounded herself in her house and garden; for she was a great gardener before it became fashionable to be so. In the drawing-room at the Lodge, masters and their wives — then all young — and Sixth Form boys gathered around the Poet. At that time he had for years been living a life apart from the crowd, and it must have been an effort to him to project himself into this young and wholly strange school society. But he did it gallantly and seemed happy among the young people. There were science evenings and poetry evenings. That is, there were evenings when masters interested in science exhibited the wonders of the microscope, and evenings when Tennyson read aloud his own poetry or Hood’s comic verses. I remember well being allowed to stay up to hear him read “Guinevere” to the Upper Sixth Form. He had a great deep voice like the booming of waves in a sea-cave, and although the situation in the poem was not one to appeal to a child, yet his reading of the farewell of Arthur to Guinevere affected me so much that I crawled into a corner and wept two pocket-handkerchiefs full of tears.

  During this visit Tennyson, who suffered sometimes from nervous depression, said more than once that he envied my father’s life of active and incessant goodness. In the man who at the height of his fame could experience and express such a feeling, there was still something of the heart of a good child — its simplicity, its humility, its “wanting to be good.”

  In June 1867, Aldworth — called at first Greenhill — appears in the letters. Emily Tennyson writes to my mother: “We have agreed to buy thirty-five acres of beautifully situated land. It is a ledge on a hill nearly 1000 feet high, all copse and foxgloves almost, and a steep descent of wood and field below; the ledge looking over an immense plain, and backed by a hill slightly higher than itself.” I quote what follows because it shows how simple had been the Freshwater life. “The order is gone for a small sociable landau. This seems so luxurious that I am afraid I am perversely more ready to cry than to laugh over it.”

  Aldworth was meant to be a small house, but somehow it grew to be a large one. The Tennysons’ own design for it was followed in the main by Mr. (afterwards Sir James) Knowles. The winds and rains of the great height have weathered stone and slate until the house and the balustrade of its wide terrace seem to have stood there two centuries, rather than not yet half of one. The planting of the Italian cypresses along the edge of the terrace was the Poet’s own particular fancy. It is strange that they should have grown so grandly on this exposed English hill-side. The darkness of their foliage, the severity of their lines, put an accent on the visionary beauty of the immense view which lies spread below and beyond them. There is the Sussex Weald, so far down that its hills and dales appear one plain, the range of the South Downs, rising yonder to Chanctonbury Ring, dropping nearer to a chalky gap which lets in the distant glitter of the sea. Hindhead, the Surrey ranges, Windsor Forest — the list grows too long of all that may be seen from Aldworth terrace, and from the heathy height above, whence seven counties are said to be visible. For my part, when looking from such heights, over the great everlasting marriage festivals of Earth and Sky, it is with difficulty, almost with reluctance, that I bring myself to connect them with the map.

  All things grow with a peculiar luxuriance on Black Down, and the immediate surroundings of the house were beautiful from the first, though the garden with its flowers and trees has added a beauty to those natural ones. The Sussex country was lonely forty years ago, and the Poet could pace his heathery ridge, brooding upon his verse, untroubled by any risk of human intrusion.

  My parents and their family came to know and love this new home as well as the old one at Freshwater, and although it represents a later stage of Tennyson’s life, the interest of the house is almost as great. The fine Laurence portrait is there, besides the admirable Watts portrait of the Poet’s wife, and that of his sons as boys. And many other pictures and things of interest and value have accumulated within its walls.

  In his old age a change, easily understood, came over the old Bard. He lost his shyness of “the crowd,” and seemed thoroughly to enjoy his glimpses of London society. He never visited us at Oxford, but when my father succeeded Dean Stanley at Westminster, my parents once more enjoyed some delightful visits from him. He was there in company with his eldest son and his daughter-in-law, on the occasion of his taking his seat in the House of Peers. Then and at other times there were memorable meetings of great men — Gladstone and others — with the Poet, in the fitting frame of the ancient Deanery.

  My mother writes of Tennyson in 1888, after thirty-three years of friendship, “he grows more and more unselfish and thoughtful for others.” She noted how the self-absorption and melancholy of his earlier years passed away in the calm sunshine of his old age.

  The passing years had brought changes to others. The brilliant little scholar with the tongue which had once held in check the boldest offender against the laws of God or the Latin Grammar — although it never smote to defend or advance himself — had ripened into the constant peacemaker; one of the gentlest and humblest of that little band, who really walk in the footsteps of their Master Christ, and make those footsteps clearer for ever to all whose privilege it has been to live in their intimacy.

  At length the day came when, full of years and honours, the famous singer, the Great Voice of Victorian England, lay silenced in the solemn shade of Westminster Abbey, with the clamour of London about him instead of the roar of his sea. It was his old friend, he who had walked and talked with him those long hours of the summer day and night thirty-seven years before, who pronounced the last blessing above his grave. And now that friend also sleeps, as it were, in the next room.

  NOTES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON by the late Master of Balliol (Professor Jowett)

  Absolute truthfulness, absolutely himself, never played tricks.

  Never got himself puffed in the newspapers.

  A friend of liberty and truth.

  Extraordinary vitality.

  Great common sense and a strong will.

  The instinct of common sense at the bottom of all he did.

  Not a man of the world (in the ordinary sense) but a man who had the greatest insight into the world, and often in a word or a sentence would flash a light.