CLEVEDON (_continued_)—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: TENNYSON
BUT Clevedon has more prominent literary associations than that just
considered, and has a place unforgettable in poetry by reason of
Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” that lengthy poem written by the future
laureate to the memory of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who, born in
1811, died untimely, at the age of twenty-two, in September 1833.
Arthur Hallam, a son of that Henry Hallam who is generally alluded to as
“the historian”—although it would puzzle most of those airy, allusive
folk to name offhand the historical works of which he was the
author—would appear to have been _in posse_ an Admirable Crichton. He
composed poetry and wrote philosophical essays at a tender age, thought
great and improving things, and had already begun to set up as something
of a paragon, when death rendered impossible the fulfilment of this
early promise. There were at that time some terribly earnest young men,
ready and willing—if not realty able—to set the world right. Prophets
and seers abounded in that dark first half of the nineteenth century,
when religion was at odds with the comparatively new era of steam and
machinery. Each one had a panacea for the ills of the age, and each had
his own little band of devoted admirers, devoted on condition that he
should in his turn spare a little admiration for those who hung upon his
words and doings. Prigs and prodigies stalked the earth, preaching new
gospels. They formed mutual-admiration societies, wherein each protested
how vastly endowed with all the virtues and all the intellect possible
was the other; and before they had outgrown their legal definition of
“infants” and had come of age and become technically men, were ready
with criticisms and appreciations of Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, and
were laying down the laws of conduct in this life, with speculations
upon what awaits us in the next. It was a morbid, unhealthy generation;
but at the same time, these sucking philosophers were not without the
tradesman instinct, and zealously combined to advertise one another.
Thus, the early Tennysonian circle at Cambridge was a Society of Mutual
Encouragement, with its eyes well fixed on publicity. How valuable were
some of these early friendships may well be guessed from the one
outstanding fact that it was Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton,
one of this circle, who at an early date, when Tennyson himself was
little more than a hopeful promise as a poet, procured by his influence
with Sir Robert Peel, the then Prime Minister, a pension of £200 a year
for his friend. It fortunately proved a wise selection; but in the case
of Tennyson’s over-elaborate post-mortem praise of his friend Hallam, we
have foisted upon us a very high estimate of one who, although engaged
to the poet’s sister, Emily, and thus additionally endeared to him, had
not yet proved himself beyond this narrow circle. He was, therefore, no
fitting subject for the “rich shrine,” as Tennyson himself styled it, of
“In Memoriam,” but should have been mourned privately.
The connection of the Hallams with Clevedon was through the mother of
Arthur. She was a daughter of Sir Abraham Elton, of Clevedon Court.
Arthur Hallam died in Austria, and his body was brought to Clevedon for
burial; hence the allusion in the poem, in that metre Tennyson fondly
imagined himself had originated:
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darkened heart that beat no more:
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
The Wye is hushed nor moved along,
And hushed my deepest grief of all,
When filled with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.
The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.
Clevedon church was selected as the resting-place of Arthur Henry
Hallam, “not only from the connection of kindred, but on account of its
still and sequestered situation on a lone hill that overhangs the
Bristol Channel.”
[Illustration: CLEVEDON.]
Much has been altered at Clevedon since 1833, when that decision was
made. The village has become a small town, of some six thousand
inhabitants, and although the ancient parish church is still at the very
fringe of modern boarding-house and lodging-house developments, yet no
one could now have the hardihood to describe its position as “lone.”
All this, if you do but consider awhile, is entirely in keeping with the
change of sentiment since that time when the poem was written.
Everything is more material. We no longer examine our souls at frequent
intervals, to see how they are getting on—after the manner of children
with garden plants. The practice is equally injurious to souls and to
plants. Yes, even in this material age, among those who have not
forgotten or denied their God there is a better spirit than that which
characterises the “In Memoriam” period. The faith that is demanded of
the Christian—the faith of little children—was not in these troubled
folk. The assurance we have of Divine infinite goodness and mercy was
not sufficient for them. They must needs enquire and speculate, and seek
to reason out those things that are beyond research and scholarship. A
great deal of mental arrogance is wrapped up in these semi-spiritual
gropings and fumblings towards the light. You see the attitude of the
consciously Superior Person therein, and all these troubles leave you
cold and unsympathetic; and all the more so when it is borne in upon you
that they were carefully pieced together and prepared for the market
during a space of sixteen years.
The inevitable result of the piecemeal and laborious methods employed is
that the belated poem lacks cohesion, and although there are gems of
thought and expression embedded in the mass of verbiage, it must needs
be confessed that “In Memoriam” is a sprawling and unwieldy tribute. The
“rich shrine” erected has indeed a great deal of uninspired journeyman
work, and is, in fact, not a little ruinous. It is safe to conclude that
portions only of it will survive, while “Maud,” that line poem of
passion, will endure so long as English verse is read.
To the present writer—if a personal note may be permitted—the tone and
outlook of this long-sustained effort are alike depressing. This is not
robust poetry, and for the already morbid-minded it is easily
conceivable that it might even be disastrous.
Tennyson in those early years had what we cannot but think the great
misfortune not to possess a local knowledge. He made a personal
acquaintance with what was then the little village of Clevedon only when
“In Memoriam” was completed, and was thus unfortunately unable to verify
some of his most important descriptive details. He visited Clevedon only
belatedly, and knew so little of the circumstances, although he publicly
mourned his friend so keenly and at such length, that he was not quite
sure where they had laid him. We observe him trying twice to place the
grave, and failing:
’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
Or else, he proceeds to say, if not in the churchyard, then in the
chancel:
Where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.
Leaving aside that shockingly infelicitous alliterative expression, “the
grapes of God,” intended to convey the meaning of “communion wine,” we
know that neither in the churchyard nor in the chancel was the body of
Arthur Hallam laid, but in the south transept. But he continues:
And in the chancel like a ghost,
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn,
making another bad shot. This, however, was remedied in later editions,
in which “dark church” was substituted for “chancel.” But, since
Clevedon church is not exceptionally dark, why not the word “transept,”
which would be absolutely correct and certainly more poetic and less
clumsy than “dark church”?
The white marble tablet to the memory of Arthur Hallam is fixed, with
those to his father and others of the family, on the west wall of the
little transept. Speaking of it, the poet says:
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name
And o’er the numbers of thy years.
It is the ghastly morbidness of this that at first arrests the reader’s
attention, and a closer examination does not by any means impress him;
for surely to describe a moonbeam as a “flame,” moonlight in fact, in
appearance, and in the long history of poetic thought being notoriously
cold and the very negation of heat, is a lapse from the rightness of
things more characteristic of a poetaster seeking at any cost a rhyme to
“name” than the mark of a great poet.
It has long been the fashion among those who shout with the biggest
crowd to point scornfully at the critic who, discussing “In Memoriam”
soon after it was published, wrote: “These touching lines evidently come
from the full heart of the widow of a military man.” This has been
termed “inept.” Now, if we turn to the dictionaries, we shall find the
commonly received definition of that word to be “unfitting.” But was it,
indeed, unfitting? The opinion of that critic did not actually fit the
facts; but the morbid tone of the poem, and the singularly feminine ring
of such phrases as “The man I held as half-divine,” “my Arthur,” and the
like, seem to many a reader to be a perfect justification of the aptness
of the critic’s views; and remind us that none other than Bulwer Lytton
once referred to Tennyson as “school-miss Alfred.”
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
There is the critic’s ample defence. To a healthily constituted mind,
that verse is more than ordinarily revolting.
The humble little hilltop church of St. Andrew, anciently a fisherman’s
chapel, has many modern rivals in suburbanised Clevedon; but in it is
centred all the ecclesiastical interest of the place. It is chiefly a
Transitional-Norman building, with aisleless nave and chancel, north and
south transepts, and central tower of Perpendicular date, but plain to
severity. The pointed Transitional arch is the finest and most elaborate
part of the building and is richly moulded. Hagioscopes command views
from either transept into the chancel. Near the chancel arch is a
curious miniature recumbent effigy, two feet six inches in length, in
the costume of the sixteenth century, representing a woman, of which no
particulars are known. It is thought to be that of a dwarf. The Hallam
and Elton monumental tablets are on the walls of the south transept; of
plain white marble, with characteristically bald monumental-mason’s
lettering; the very _ne plus ultra_ of the commonplace and
matter-of-fact, and very trying indeed to hero-worshipping pilgrims. For
ornament and display of mosaic and gilding the visitor should turn to
the reredos, recently placed in the chancel. Whether he will delight in
it, after the severity of the tablets, is a matter for individual
prejudices; but he surely will not feel delighted by being approached by
a caretaker with pencil and notebook and a request for a gift towards
the restoration fund—which doubtless includes the cost of this
theatrical reredos. It has come to this: that the Tennysonian
association has been made the excuse and stalking-horse for badgering
the visitor for sixpences. The wise visitor, whether he approves of
elaborate restoration or not, will leave those who called the tune to
pay the piper, and will further leave to the Elton family of Clevedon
Court, who draw an excellent revenue from their property here, the duty
and the pleasure of footing the bills that may yet be unsatisfied.
Clevedon Court lies away back on the direct Bristol road, over a mile
distant from the church and the sea, and removed from the modern
developments of the place, which at one and the same time have largely
enriched its owners, the Elton family, and have rendered the
neighbourhood less desirable as a residence to them. Ever, with each
succeeding phase of Clevedon’s growth, the sweetly beautiful valley that
runs up hither from the sea is further encroached upon by houses, until
at the present time a few outlying blocks are within sight of the Court
itself. The recently opened light railway also bids fair to be the
prelude to further building-operations.
Meanwhile, the grounds of the Court remain as beautiful as ever,
ascending to a long and lofty ridge, heavily wooded. The Court itself,
of which the interior is not generally shown, stands prominently facing
the park wall and the road, only a few yards away, and is quite easily
to be seen. It is a long, low mansion, a singular mass of Gothic gables,
chimneys, and terraces, dating originally from the early years of the
fourteenth century, when it was built by the De Clyvedons. Court and
estates passed with an heiress by marriage to one Thomas Hogshaw, thence
in the same manner to the Lovell family, and from them to the Wakes,
whose arms and allusive motto, “Wake and Pray,” are to be found in parts
of the house altered by them about 1570. The Wake family sold their
possessions at Clevedon to Digby, Earl of Bristol; and finally the
executors of the third Earl sold them to the Elton family in the time of
Queen Anne.
Great destruction was caused to the west front of the Court by the fire
that broke out in November 1882, but the damage has been so skilfully
repaired that, to any save the closest inspection, the building retains
the aspect it had long presented. The chief feature of the principal
front, of fourteenth-century date, is the entrance-porch, with
portcullis, and room over. Here, midway along the irregular front, is a
very large square window, filled with curiously diapered tracery.
Thackeray, who often visited here, as a friend of the Rev. William H.
Brookfield and his wife, Jane Octavia, sister of Sir Charles Elton, then
owner of Clevedon Court, has left a somewhat striking pencil sketch of
the building, viewed from this point. The house is the original of
“Castlewood,” in his novel, “Esmond.”
[Illustration: CLEVEDON COURT.]
Clevedon Court was largely rearranged in the time of Queen Elizabeth, in
accordance with the ideas of comfort then prevailing, considerably in
advance of those that ruled when it was originally built, in the reign
of Edward the Second. But it was left to the remarkable people who ruled
when the nineteenth century was yet young to further modernise the
ancient residence, and they perpetrated strange things: painting and
graining interior stonework to resemble oak, and the like atrocities;
the highest ambition of builders and decorators in that era of shame
being to treat honest materials as though they were not to be shown for
what they really were, and to make them masquerade as something else. No
one ever was deceived by the plaster of that age, pretending to be
stone; and stone that was given two coats of paint and tickled with a
grainer’s comb, and then finished off with varnish, never yet made
convincing oak, any more than “marbled” wall-papers looked or felt like
real marble; but those were then conventional treatments, and were
followed and honoured all over the land.
At the same time, the ancient oak roof of the hall of Clevedon Court was
hidden behind a plaster ceiling.
But the house is not sought out only for its antiquity, or for the
beauty of its situation, or even for its Thackeray associations. After
all, does any considerable section of the public really care for
Thackeray landmarks? Writers of literary gossip, of prefaces to new
editions, may affect to think so, but, in fact, Thackeray does not
command that intimate sympathy which Dickens enjoys. Sentiment does not
attach itself to the satirist, who, in the odd moments when he, too,
sentimentalises, is apt to be suspected, quite wrongly, of insincerity.
It is for its Tennyson associations that Clevedon Court is sought by
most tourists.
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