Cambridge man; but if Ruskin was decidedly a representative of Oxford,
Tennyson was a true son of the sister University. I had been taught to
admire Tennyson by my young friends at Oxford, many of whom were
enthusiastic worshippers of the poet. My friends often forgot that I had
been brought up on German poetry, and that though I knew Heine, Rückert,
Eichendorff, Chamisso, and Geibel, to say nothing of Goethe, Schiller,
Bürger, and even Klopstock, their allusions to Tennyson, Browning, nay,
to Shelley and Keats, often fell by the wayside and were entirely lost
on me.
However, I soon learnt to enjoy Tennyson’s poetry, its finish, its
delicacy, its moderation—I mean, the absence of all extravagance; yet
there is but one of his books which has remained with me a treasure for
life, his “In Memoriam.” To have expressed such deep, true, and original
thought as is contained in each of these short poems in such perfect
language, to say nothing of rhyme, was indeed a triumph. Tennyson was
very kind to me, and took a warm interest in my work, particularly in my
mythological studies. I well remember his being struck by a metaphor in
my first Essay on Comparative Mythology, published in 1856, and his
telling me so. I had said that the sun in his daily passage across the
sky had ploughed a golden furrow through the human brain, whence sprang
in ancient times the first germs of mythology, and afterwards the rich
harvest of religious thought.
“I don’t know,” he said, “whether the simile is quite correct, but I
like it.” I was of course very proud that the great poet should have
pondered on any sentence of mine, and still more that he should have
approved of my theory of seeing in mythology a poetical interpretation
of the great phenomena of nature. But it was difficult to have a long
discussion with him. He was fond of uttering short and decisive
sentences: his yes was yes indeed, and his no was no indeed.
It was generally after dinner, when smoking his pipe and sipping his
whiskey and water, that Tennyson began to thaw, and to take a more
active part in conversation. People who have not known him then, have
hardly known him at all. During the day he was often very silent and
absorbed in his own thoughts, but in the evening he took an active part
in the conversation of his friends. His pipe was almost indispensable to
him, and I remember one time when I and several friends were staying at
his house, the question of tobacco turned up. I confessed that for years
I had been a perfect slave to tobacco, so that I could neither read nor
write a line without smoking, but that at last I had rebelled against
this slavery, and had entirely given up tobacco. Some of his friends
taunted Tennyson that he could never give up tobacco. “Anybody can do
that,” he said, “if he chooses to do it.” When his friends still
continued to doubt and to tease him, “Well,” he said, “I shall give up
smoking from to-night.” The very same evening I was told that he threw
his pipes and his tobacco out of the window of his bedroom. The next day
he was most charming, though somewhat self-righteous. The second day he
became very moody and captious, the third day no one knew what to do
with him. But after a disturbed night I was told that he got out of bed
in the morning, went quietly into the garden, picked up one of his
broken pipes, stuffed it with the remains of the tobacco scattered
about, and then, having had a few puffs, came to breakfast, all right
again. Nothing was said any more about giving up tobacco.
He once very kindly offered to lend me his house in the Isle of Wight.
“But mind,” he said, “you will be watched from morning till evening.”
This was in fact his great grievance, that he could not go out without
being stared at. Once taking a walk with me and my wife on the downs
behind his house, he suddenly started, left us, and ran home, simply
because he had descried two strangers coming towards us.
I was told that he once complained to the Queen, and said that he could
no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists who came
to stare at him. The Queen, with a kindly irony, remarked that she did
not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson, not seeing what she
meant, replied: “No, madam, and if I could clap a sentinel wherever I
liked, I should not be troubled either.”
It must be confessed that people were very inconsiderate. Rows of
tourists sat like sparrows on the paling of his garden, waiting for his
appearance. The guides were actually paid by sightseers, particularly by
those from America, for showing them the great poet. Nay, they went so
far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson, and the result was
that, after their trick had been found out, the tourists would walk up
to Tennyson and ask him: “Now, are you the real Tennyson?” This, no
doubt, was very annoying, and later on Lord Tennyson was driven to pay a
large sum for some useless downs near his house, simply in order to
escape from the attentions of admiring travellers.
Why should not people be satisfied with the best that a poet is and can
give them, namely his poetry? Why should they wish to stare at him? Few
poets are greater than their poetry, and Tennyson was not one of them.
Like all really great men, Tennyson disliked the worship that was paid
him by many who came to stare at him and to pour out the usual phrases
of admiration before him. Tennyson frequently took flight from his
intending Boswells, and he was the very last man to appreciate the “_Il
parle_” by which in Paris all conversation was hushed whenever Victor
Hugo was present at a dinner and spoke to his neighbour, possibly only
to ask him for the _menu_.
People have learnt after his death what a possession they had in
Tennyson. He may not rank among the greatest poets of England, but there
was something high and noble in him which reacted on the nation at
large, even though that influence was not perhaps consciously realised.
Anyhow, after his death, it was widely felt that there was nobody worthy
to fill his place; and why was it not left empty, as in the Greek army,
where, we are told, a place of honour was reserved for a great hero who
was supposed to be present during the heat of the battle, and to inspire
those who stood near his place to great deeds of valour?
Browning was neither of Cambridge nor of Oxford, but his genius was much
more akin to Oxford than to Cambridge, and towards the end of his life,
particularly after his son had entered at Balliol College, he was very
often seen amongst us. Though he was not what we call a scholar, his
mind was saturated with classical lore, and his appreciation of Greek
poetry, Greek mythology, and Greek sculpture was very keen. He could not
quote Greek verses, but he was steeped in the Greek tragedians and lyric
poets. Of course this classical sympathy was but one side of his poetry.
Browning was full of sympathy, nay, of worship, for anything noble and
true in literature, ancient or modern. And what was most delightful in
him was his ready response, his generosity in pouring out his own
thoughts before anybody who shared his sympathies. For real and
substantial conversation there was no one his equal, and even in the
lighter after-dinner talk he was admirable. His health seemed good, and
he was able to sacrifice much of his time to society. He had one great
advantage, he never consented to spoil his dinner by making, or, what is
still worse, by having to make, a speech. I once felt greatly aggrieved,
sitting opposite Browning at one of the Royal Academy dinners. I had to
return thanks for literature and scholarship, and was of course
rehearsing my speech during the whole of dinner-time, while he enjoyed
himself talking to his friends. When I told him that it was a shame that
I should be made a martyr of while he was enjoying his dinner in peace,
he laughed, and said that he had said No once for all, and that he had
never in his life made a public speech. I believe, as a rule, poets are
not good speakers. They are too careful about what they wish to say. As
dinner advanced I became more and more convinced of the etymological
identity of _honor_ and _onus_. At last my turn came. Having to face the
brilliant society which is always present at this dinner, including the
Prince of Wales, the Ministers of both parties, the most eminent
artists, scientists, authors and critics, I had of course learnt my
speech by heart, and was getting on very well, when suddenly I saw the
Prince of Wales laughing and saying something to his neighbour. At once
the thread of my speech was broken. I began to think whether I could
have said anything that made the Prince laugh, and what it could have
been, and while I was thinking in every direction, I suddenly stood
speechless. I thought it was an eternity, and I was afraid I should have
to collapse and make the greatest fool of myself that ever was. I looked
at Browning and he gave me a friendly nod, and at that moment my
grapple-irons caught the lost cable and I was able to finish my speech.
When it was over I turned to Browning and said: “Was it not fearful,
that pause?” “Far from it,” he said, “it was excellent. It gave life to
your speech. Everybody saw you were collecting your thoughts, and that
you were not simply delivering what you had learnt by heart. Besides, it
did not last half a minute.” To me it had seemed at least five or ten
minutes. But after Browning’s good-natured words I felt relieved, and
enjoyed at least what was left of a most enjoyable dinner, the only
enjoyable public dinner I know.
The best place to see Browning was Venice, and I think it was there that
I saw him for the last time. He was staying in one of the smaller
palaces with a friend, and he was easily persuaded to read some of his
poems. I asked him for his poem on Andrea del Sarto, and his delivery
was most simple and yet most telling. He was a far better reader than
Tennyson. His voice was natural, sonorous, and full of delicate shades;
while Tennyson read in so deep a tone, that it was like the rumbling and
rolling sound of the sea rather than like a human voice. His admirers,
both gentlemen and ladies, who thought that everything he did must be
perfect, encouraged him in that kind of delivery; and while to me it
seemed that he had smothered and murdered some of the poems I liked
best, they sighed and groaned and poured out strange interjections,
meant to be indicative of rapture.
There is a definiteness in Tennyson’s poetry which makes it easy to
recite and even to declaim his poems, while many of Browning’s
compositions do not lend themselves at all to vivâ voce repetition.
There is always a superabundance of thought and feeling in them, and his
mastery of rhyme and rhythm proved a temptation which he could not
always resist. One often wished that some of Browning’s poems could have
passed through the Tennysonian sieve, to take away all that is
unnecessary in them, and to moderate his exuberant revelling in
language. Still his friends know what they possess in his poetry. When
they are sad, he makes them joyful; when they exult, he tones them down;
when they are hungry, he feeds them; when they are poor, he makes them
rich; and, like a true prophet, he knows how to bring fresh water out of
the rocks, out of the commonest events in our journey through the desert
of life. It is a pity that his poetry does not lend itself to
translation. Perhaps he is too thoroughly English, perhaps his sentences
are too labyrinthine even for German readers. Anyhow, Browning is known
abroad much less than Tennyson, and if translatableness is a test of
true poetry, his poetry would not stand that test well.
To have known such men as Tennyson and Browning is indeed a rare
fortune. It helps us in two ways. We are preserved from extravagant
admiration, which is always stupid; and, on the other hand, we can enjoy
even insignificant verses of theirs, as coming from our friends and
lighting up some corner of their character. There are cases where
personal acquaintance with the poets actually spoils our taste for their
poetry, which we might otherwise have enjoyed; and to imagine that one
knows a poet better because one has once shaken hands with him, is a
fatal mistake. It would be far better to go at once to Westminster
Abbey, and spend a few thoughtful moments at the tombs of such poets as
Tennyson or Browning, for there, at all events, there would be no
disappointment.
LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS
IV
Authors complain, and in many cases complain justly, of the large number
of letters and visits which they receive from unknown friends and
distant admirers. I myself, though the subjects on which I write are not
exactly popular, have been sitting at the receipt of such custom for
many years. It is difficult to know what to do. To answer all the
letters, even to acknowledge all the books that are sent to me from
India, Australia, New Zealand, from every new sphere of influence in
Africa, from America, North and South, and from the principal countries
of Europe, would be physically impossible. A simple knowledge of
arithmetic would teach my friends that if I were only to glance at a
book in order to give an opinion, or say something pleasant about it,
one hour at least of my time in the morning would certainly be consumed
by every single book. Every writer imagines that he is the only one who
writes a letter, asks a question, or sends a book; but he forgets that
in this respect everybody has as much right as everybody else, and
claims it too, unmindful of the rights of others, and quite unconscious
that the sum total of such interruptions would swallow up the whole of a
man’s working day. And there is this further danger: however guarded one
may be in expressing one’s gratitude or one’s opinion of the merits of a
book, one’s letter is apt to appear in advertisements, if only far away
in India or the Colonies; nay, we often find that the copy of a book was
not even sent us by the author himself, but with the author’s
compliments, that is, by an enterprising publisher.
However, there is a compensation in all things, and I gladly confess
that I have occasionally derived great advantage from the letters of my
unknown friends. They have sent me valuable corrections and useful
remarks for my books, they have made me presents of MSS. and local
publications difficult to get even at the Bodleian and the British
Museum, and I feel sure that they have not been offended even though I
could not enter into a long correspondence with every one of my
epistolary friends on the origin of language or the home of the Aryan
race. My worst friends are those who send me their own writings and wish
me to give an opinion, or to find a publisher for them. Had I attempted
to comply with one half of these requests, I could have done nothing
else in life. What would become of me if everybody who cannot find a
publisher were to write to me! The introduction of postcards has proved,
no doubt, a great blessing to all who are supposed to be oracles, but
even an oracular response takes time. Speaking for myself, I may truly
say that I often feel tempted to write to a man who is an authority on a
special subject on which I want information. I know he could answer my
question in five minutes, and yet I hardly ever venture to make the
appeal, but go to a library, where I have to waste hours and hours in
finding the right book, and afterwards the right passage in it. Why
should not others do the same?
And what applies to letters applies to personal visits also. I do
sometimes get impatient when perfect strangers call on me without any
kind of introduction, sometimes even without a visiting card, and then
sit down to propound some theory of their own. Still, taking all in all,
I must not complain of my visitors. They do not come in shoals like
letters and books, and very often they are interesting and even
delightful. Many of them come from America, and the mere fact that they
want to see me is a compliment which I appreciate. They have read my
books, that is another compliment which I always value; and they often
speak to me of things that years ago I have said in some article of
mine, and which I myself have often quite forgotten.
It strikes me that Americans possess in a very high degree the gift of
sight-seeing. They possess what at school was called _pace_. They travel
over England in a fortnight, but at the end they seem to have seen all
that is, and all who are, worth seeing. We wonder how they can enjoy
anything. But they do enjoy what they see, and they carry away a great
many photographs, not only in their albums but in their memory also. The
fact is that they generally come well prepared, and know beforehand what
they want to see; and, after all, there are limits to everything. If we
have only a quarter of an hour to look at the Madonna di San Sisto, may
not that short exposure give us an excellent negative in our memory, if
only our brain is sensitive, and the lens of our eyes clear and strong?
The Americans, knowing that their time is limited, make certainly an
excellent use of it, and seem to carry away more than many travellers
who stand for hours with open mouths before a Raphael, and in the end
know no more of the picture than of the frame. It requires sharp eyes
and a strong will to see much in a short time. Some portrait painters,
for instance, catch a likeness in a few minutes; others sit and sit, and
stare and stare, and alter and alter, and never perceive the real
characteristic points in a face.
It is the same with the American interviewer. I do not like him, and I
think he ought at all events to tell us that we are being interviewed.
Even ancient statues are protected now against snap-shots in the museums
of antiquities. But with all that I cannot help admiring him. His skill,
in the cases where I have been under his scalpel or before his brush,
has certainly been extraordinary, and several of them seem to have seen
in my house, in my garden, in my library, and in my face, what I myself
had never detected there, and all that in about half an hour. I remember
one visit, however, which was rather humiliating. An American gentleman
(I did not know that he was interviewing me) had been sitting with me
for a long time, asking all sorts of questions and making evidently a
trigonometrical survey of myself and my surroundings. At last I had to
tell him that I was sorry I had to go, as I had to deliver a lecture. As
he seemed so interested in my work I naturally expected he would ask me
to allow him to hear my lecture. Nothing of the kind! “I am sorry,” he
said, “but you don’t mind my sitting here in your library till you come
back?” And, true enough, there I found him when I came home after an
hour, and he was delighted to see me again. Some months after I had my
reward in a most charming account of an interview with Professor Max
Müller, published in an American journal. This power of observation
which these interviewers, and to a certain extent most American
travellers, seem to possess, is highly valuable, and as most of us
cannot hope to have more than a few hours to see such monuments as St.
Peter or Santa Sophia, or such giants as Tennyson or Browning, we ought
to take a leaf out of the book of our American friends, and try to
acquire some of their pace and go.
And then, America does not send us interviewers only, but nearly all
their most eminent men and their most charming women pay us the
compliment of coming over to the old country. They generally cannot give
us more than a few days, or it may be a few hours only; and in that
short space we also have to learn how to measure them, how to appreciate
and love them. It has to be done quickly, or not at all. Living at
Oxford, I have had the good fortune of receiving visits from Emerson,
Dr. Wendell Holmes, and Lowell, to speak of the brightest stars only.
Each of them stayed at our house for several days, so that I could take
them in at leisure, while others had to be taken at one gulp, often
between one train and the next. Oxford has a great attraction for all
Americans, and it is a pleasure to see how completely at home they feel
in the memories of the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and
Lowell were staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons, the teas and
dinners, and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and
gardens are possessions for ever.
Emerson, I am grieved to say, when during his last visit to England he
spent some days with us, accompanied and watched over by his devoted
daughter, was already on the brink of that misfortune which overtook him
in his old age. His memory often failed him, but as through a mist the
bright and warm sun of his mind was always shining, and many of his
questions and answers have remained engraved in my memory, weak and
shaky as that too begins to be. I had forgotten that Emerson had ceased
to be an active preacher, and I told him that I rather envied him the
opportunity of speaking now and then to his friends and neighbours on
subjects on which we can seldom speak except in church. He then told me
not only what he had told others, that “he had had enough of it,” but he
referred to an episode in his life, or rather in that of his brother,
which struck me as very significant at the time. “There was an
ecclesiastical leaven in our family,” he said. “My brother and I were
both meant for the ministry in the Unitarian community. My brother was
sent by my father to Germany (I believe to Göttingen), and after a
thorough study of theology was returning to America. On the voyage home
the ship was caught in a violent gale, and all hope of saving the ship
and the lives of the passengers was given up. At that time my brother
said his prayers, and made a vow that if his life should be spared he
would never preach again, but give up theology altogether and earn an
honest living in some other way. The ship weathered the storm, my
brother’s life was saved, and, in spite of all entreaties, he kept his
vow. Something of the same kind may have influenced me,” he added:
“anyhow, I felt that there was better work for me to do than to preach
from the pulpit.” And so, no doubt, there was for this wonderfully
gifted man, particularly at the time and in the place where he lived. A
few years’ study at Göttingen might have been useful to the younger
Emerson by showing him the track followed by other explorers of the
unknown seas of religion and philosophy, but he felt in himself the
force to grapple with the great problems of the world without going
first to school to learn how others before him had grappled with them.
And this was perhaps the best for him and for us. His freshness and his
courage remained undamped by the failures of others, and the directness
of his judgment and poetical intuition had freer scope in his rhapsodies
than it would have had in learned treatises. I do not wonder that
philosophers by profession had at first nothing to say to his essays
because they did not seem to advance their favourite inquiries beyond
the point they had reached before. But there were many people,
particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any
learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them
what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness,
self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see
it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. Socrates or Plato, if
suddenly brought to life again in America, might have spoken like
Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that
produced by Socrates in olden times.