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TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: _Alfred, Lord Tennyson (in his 80th year)_
_Barraud, photographer Emery Walker, Ph.sc._]
TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS
EDITED BY
HALLAM, LORD TENNYSON
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1911
Dedicated
TO
THE FRIENDS OF TENNYSON
BY
HIS SON
PREFACE
To those who have contributed to this volume their memories of my father,
criticisms of his work, or records of his friends, I owe a deep debt of
gratitude. Three of the writers, Henry Butcher, Sir Alfred Lyall, and
Graham Dakyns, have lately, to my great loss, passed away--into that
fuller "light of friendship"--
"a clearer day
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth."
TENNYSON.
[The following chapters about my father are arranged, as far as possible,
according to the sequence of his life. Further reminiscences by the Duke
of Argyll, Gladstone, Jowett, Lecky, Locker-Lampson, Palgrave, Lord
Selborne, Tyndall, Aubrey de Vere, and other friends, will be found in
_Tennyson, a Memoir_.]
CONTENTS
PAGE
RECOLLECTIONS OF MY EARLY LIFE. By EMILY, LADY TENNYSON 3
TENNYSON AND LINCOLNSHIRE. By WILLINGHAM RAWNSLEY--
I. TENNYSON'S COUNTRY 8
II. THE SOMERSBY FRIENDS 18
TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS, FREDERICK AND CHARLES. By CHARLES
TENNYSON 33
TENNYSON ON HIS CAMBRIDGE FRIENDS--
ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM 71
TO JAMES SPEDDING 72
TO EDWARD FITZGERALD 75
TO JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 78
TO J. W. BLAKESLEY 78
TO R. C. TRENCH 79
TO THE REV. W. H. BROOKFIELD 80
TO EDMUND LUSHINGTON 81
CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER 86
TENNYSON AND LUSHINGTON. By SIR HENRY CRAIK, K.C.B., M.P. 89
TENNYSON, FITZGERALD, CARLYLE, AND OTHER FRIENDS. By DR. WARREN,
President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and now Professor of
Poetry 98
SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON'S TALK FROM 1835 TO 1853. By
EDWARD FITZGERALD 142
TENNYSON AND THACKERAY. By LADY RITCHIE 148
TENNYSON ON HIS FRIENDS OF LATER LIFE--
TO W. C. MACREADY 157
TO THE REV. F. D. MAURICE 157
TO SIR JOHN SIMEON 159
TO EDWARD LEAR ON HIS TRAVELS IN GREECE 160
TO THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 161
TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL 162
TO GIFFORD PALGRAVE 162
TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA 165
TO W. E. GLADSTONE 167
TO MARY BOYLE 168
W. G. WARD 171
TO SIR RICHARD JEBB 171
TO GENERAL HAMLEY 172
LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE 173
GENERAL GORDON 173
G. F. WATTS, R.A. 173
TENNYSON AND BRADLEY (DEAN OF WESTMINSTER). By MARGARET
L. WOODS 175
NOTES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON. By the late MASTER OF
BALLIOL (PROFESSOR JOWETT) 186
TENNYSON, CLOUGH, AND THE CLASSICS. By HENRY GRAHAM DAKYNS 188
RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON. By the Rev. H. MONTAGU BUTLER, D.D.,
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge 206
TENNYSON AND W. G. WARD AND OTHER FARRINGFORD FRIENDS. By
WILFRID WARD 222
TENNYSON AND ALDWORTH. By SIR JAMES KNOWLES, K.C.V.O. 245
THE FUNERAL OF DICKENS 253
FRAGMENTARY NOTES OF TENNYSON'S TALK. By ARTHUR
COLERIDGE 255
MUSIC, TENNYSON, AND JOACHIM. By SIR CHARLES STANFORD 272
THE ATTITUDE OF TENNYSON TOWARDS SCIENCE. By SIR OLIVER LODGE,
F.R.S. 280
TENNYSON AS A STUDENT AND POET OF NATURE. By SIR NORMAN
LOCKYER, F.R.S. 285
MEMORIES. By E. V. B. 292
TENNYSON AND HIS TALK ON SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS. By the Right
Rev. the BISHOP OF RIPON 295
TENNYSON AND SIR JOHN SIMEON, AND TENNYSON'S LAST YEARS. By
LOUISA E. WARD 306
SIR JOHN SIMEON. By AUBREY DE VERE 321
TENNYSON. By ARTHUR SIDGWICK, Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford,
and sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 322
TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK. By the Right Hon. SIR ALFRED
LYALL, G.C.B. 344
TENNYSON: THE POET AND THE MAN. By PROFESSOR HENRY BUTCHER 385
JAMES SPEDDING. By W. ALDIS WRIGHT, Vice-Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge 393
ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM. By DR. JOHN BROWN 441
APPENDICES
A. THE COMMENTS OF TENNYSON ON ONE OF HIS LATER ETHICAL POEMS 475
B. "HANDS ALL ROUND," SET TO MUSIC BY EMILY, LADY TENNYSON 481
C. MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS FROM UNKNOWN FRIENDS 485
D. TENNYSON'S ARTHURIAN POEM 498
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACE PAGE
IN PHOTOGRAVURE
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (in his 80th year) _Frontispiece_
Emily, Lady Tennyson. From a drawing by G. F. Watts, R.A. 3
IN BLACK AND WHITE
Frederick Tennyson 33
Charles Tennyson-Turner 58
A. H. H. 71
Edmund Lushington 89
The Drive at Farringford, showing on the left the "Wellingtonia"
planted by Garibaldi 163
Tennyson and his two Sons 188
Arthur Tennyson 222
Horatio Tennyson 229
The South Side of Entrance from below the Terrace, Aldworth 245
Summer-house at Farringford, where "Enoch Arden" was written 292
The Corner of the Study at Farringford where Tennyson wrote,
with his Deerhound "Lufra" and the Terrier "Winks" in the
foreground 306
Arthur Hallam reading "Walter Scott" aloud on board the "Leeds,"
bound from Bordeaux to Dublin, Sept. 9, 1830 441
TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS
JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER
(DEDICATION OF "THE DEATH OF OENONE" TO EMILY, LADY TENNYSON)
There on the top of the down,
The wild heather round me and over me June's high blue,
When I look'd at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown,
I thought to myself I would offer this book to you,
This, and my love together,
To you that are seventy-seven,
With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,
And a fancy as summer-new
As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.
[Illustration: _Emily Lady Tennyson from a drawing by G. F. Watts, R.A._
_Emery Walker, Ph.sc._]
RECOLLECTIONS OF MY EARLY LIFE
By EMILY, LADY TENNYSON
Written for her son in 1896
You ask me to tell you something of my life before marriage at Horncastle
in Lincolnshire. It would be hard indeed not to do anything you ask of me
if within my power. To say the truth, this particular thing you want is
somewhat painful. The first thing I remember of my father[1] is his
looking at me with sad eyes after my mother's[2] death. Her I recollect,
passing the window in a velvet pelisse, and then in a white shawl on the
sofa, and then crowned with roses--beautiful in death. I recollect, too,
being carried to her funeral; but I asked what they were doing, and in all
this had no idea of death.
My life before marriage was in many ways sad: in one, however, unspeakably
happy. No one could have had a better father, or been happier with her two
sisters, Anne and Louisa. Although, if we were too merry and noisy in the
mornings, we were summoned by my Aunt Betsy (who lived with us) all three
into her room, to hold out our small hands for stripes from a certain
little riding-whip; or if, later in the day, our needlework was not well
done we had our fingers pricked with a needle, or if the lessons were not
finished, we had fools' caps put on our heads, and were banished to a
corner of the room. My aunt's nature was by no means cruel; she was, on
the whole, kind and dutiful to us, yet no doubt with effort on her part,
for she had no instinctive love of children.
Among our neighbours we had as friends the Tennysons, the Rawnsleys, the
Bellinghams, and the Massingberds. The death of my cousin, Mr. Cracroft,
was among my early tragedies. He had been on public business at Lincoln:
and on his return to Horncastle, was seized at our house with Asiatic
cholera, a solitary case, which proved fatal. Ourselves and his daughters
heard of it in a strange way. We were in a tent at a sheep-shearing, the
great rustic festival of that day. A village boy came into our tent, and
swarmed up the pole, saying to us, "I know something; your father is
dead." We hurried home, and we, three sisters, were put by my aunt (to
keep us quiet) to the hitherto-unwonted task of stoning raisins. This made
me so indignant that I threw my raisins over the edge of the bowl, and
forthwith my aunt caught me up, and--so rough was the treatment of
children then--banged my head against the door of our old wainscoted
rooms, until I called out for my father, crying aloud, "Murder"; when he
rushed in and saved me.
My next memory of my father is his giving me Latin lessons; and at this
time I somehow came across a copy of _Cymbeline_, which I read with great
delight. Then we had our first riding-lessons. I well recall my dislike of
riding, when my pony was fastened to a circus stake, which I had to go
round and round. Unfortunately, much as my father wished it, I never
became a good horsewoman. He himself was so good a rider, when all the
gentlemen of the county were volunteers, that he could ride horses which
no one else could ride--so my grandmother would tell me with
pride--adding, "Your father and his brother (both six foot three) were the
handsomest men among them all." At that time he kept guard with his
fellow-volunteers over the French prisoners, who, he said, were always
cheerful and always singing their patriotic songs.
But to return to my sisters and myself. For exercise we generally took
long walks in the country, and I remember that when staying at my father's
house in Berkshire[3] we often used to wander up to a tower among our
woods where a gaunt old lady lived, called Black Jane, who told our
fortunes. We had our favourite theatricals, too, like other children. Our
dramatic performances were frequent, and our plays were, some of them,
drawn from Miss Edgeworth's tales. I was always fond of music, and used to
sing duets with my soldier cousin, Richard Sellwood.
At eight years old I was sent, with my sisters, to some ladies for daily
lessons, and later to schools in Brighton and London, for my father
disliked having a governess in the house. So, much as he objected to young
girls being sent from home, school in our case seemed the lesser evil. My
sisters liked school; to me it was dreadful. As soon as I reached the
Brighton seminary, I remember that for weeks I appeared to be in a
horrible dream, and the voices of the mistresses and the girls around me
seemed to be all thin, like voices from the grave. I could not be happy
away from my father, who was my idol, though after a while I grew more
accustomed to the strange life. My father would never let us go the long,
cold journey at Christmas time from Brighton to Horncastle, but came up
to town for the vacation, and took us for treats to the National Gallery,
and other places of interest. Great was the joy, when the summer holidays
arrived, and after travelling by coach through the day and night, we three
sisters saw Whittlesea-mere gleaming under the sunrise. It seemed as if we
were within sight of home.
When I was eighteen, my Aunt Betsy left us to live by herself alone. We
spent rather recluse lives, but we were perfectly happy, my father reading
to us every evening from about half-past eight to ten, the hour at which
we had family prayers. Most delightful were the readings; for instance,
all of Gibbon that could be read to us, Macaulay's _Essays_, Sir Walter
Scott's novels. For my private reading he gave me Dante, Ariosto, and
Tasso, Molière, Racine, Corneille. Later I read Schiller, Goethe, Jean
Paul Richter; and for English--Pearson, Paley's _Translation of the Early
Fathers_, Coleridge's works, Wordsworth, and of course Milton and
Shakespeare. We had walks and drives and music and needlework. Now and
again we dined in the neighbourhood, and some of the neighbours dined with
us; and once a year my father asked all the legal luminaries of Horncastle
to dinner with him.
Before my sister Louy married your Uncle Charles (Tennyson-Turner) in
1836, my cousin, Catherine Franklin, daughter of Sir Willingham Franklin,
took up her abode with us, and we had several dances at our house. Two
fancy-dress dances I well remember. Louy and I disliked visiting in London
and in country-houses, and so we always refused, and sent Anne in our
stead. My first ball, I thought an opening of the great portals of the
world, and I looked forward to it almost with awe. It is rather curious
that at one of my very few balls, Mr. Musters (Jack Musters his intimates
called him), who married Byron's Mary Chaworth, should have asked for,
and obtained, an introduction to me.
In 1842 came Catherine's marriage to our true friend, Drummond Rawnsley,
the parson of the Rawnsley family; and then my sister Anne married Charles
Weld. After this my father and I lived together alone. The only change we
had from our routine life was a journey, one summer, to Tours, with Anne
and Charles Weld, and his brother Isaac Weld, the accomplished owner of
Ravenswell, near Bray, in Ireland.
At your father's home, Somersby, we used to have evenings of music and
singing. Your Aunt Mary played on the harp as her father used to do. She
was a splendid-looking girl, and would have made a beautiful picture. Then
your Aunt Emily (beloved of Arthur Hallam) had wonderful eyes--depths on
depths they seemed to have--and a fine profile. "Testa Romana" an old
Italian said of her. She had more of the colouring of the South,
inherited, perhaps, from a member of Madame de Maintenon's family who
married one of the Tennysons. Your father had also the same kind of
colouring. All, brothers and sisters, were fair to see. Your father was
kingly, masses of fine, wavy hair, very dark, with a pervading shade of
gold, and long, as it was then worn. His manner was kind, simple, and
dignified, with plenty of sportiveness flashing out from time to time.
During my ten years' separation from him the doctors believed I was going
into a consumption, and the Lincolnshire climate was pronounced to be too
cold for me; and we moved to London, to look for a home in the south of
England. We found one at last at Hale near Farnham, which was called by
your father "my paradise." The recollection of this delightful country
made me persuade your father eventually to build a house near Haslemere.
We were married on June 13, 1850, at Shiplake on the Thames.
TENNYSON AND LINCOLNSHIRE
By WILLINGHAM RAWNSLEY
I
TENNYSON'S COUNTRY
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold.
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main.
Lincolnshire is a big county, measuring seventy-five miles by forty-five,
but it is perhaps the least well known of all the counties of England. The
traveller by the Great Northern main line passes through but a small
portion of its south-western fringe near Grantham; and if he goes along
the eastern side from Peterborough to Grimsby or Hull, he gains no insight
into the picturesque parts of the county, for the line takes him over the
rich flat fenlands with their black vegetable mould devoid of any kind of
stone or pebble, and intersected by those innumerable dykes or drains
varying from 8 to 80 feet across, which give the southern division of
Lincolnshire an aspect in harmony with its Batavian name "the parts of
Holland."
The Queen of this flat fertile plain is Boston, with her wonderful
church-tower and lantern 280 feet high, a marvel of symmetry when you are
near it, and visible for more than twenty miles in all directions. Owing
to its slender height it seems, from a distance, to stand up like a tall
thick mast or tree-trunk, and is hence known to all the countryside as
"Boston stump."
At this town, the East Lincolnshire line divides: one section goes to the
left to Lincoln; the other, following the bend of the coast at about seven
miles' distance from the sea, turns when opposite Skegness and runs, at
right angles to its former course, to Louth,--Louth whose beautiful church
spire was painted by Turner in his picture of "The Horse Fair."
The more recent Louth-to-Lincoln line completes the fourth side of a
square having Boston, Burgh, Louth, and Lincoln for its corners, which
contains the fairest portion of the Lincolnshire wolds, and within this
square is Somersby, Tennyson's birthplace and early home. It is a tiny
village surrounded by low green hills; and close at hand, here nestling in
a leafy hollow, and there standing boldly on the "ridgèd wold," are some
half a dozen churches built of the local "greensand" rock, from whose
towers the Poet in his boyhood heard:
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist--
the mist which lay athwart those "long gray fields at night," and marked
the course of the beloved Somersby brook.
If we go past the little gray church with its perfect specimen of a
pre-Reformation cross hard by the porch, and past the modest house almost
opposite, which was for over thirty years the home of the Tennysons, we
shall come at once to the point where the road dips to a little wood
through which runs the rivulet so lovingly described by the Poet when he
was leaving the home of his youth:
Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
and again:
Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;
Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove.
Northward, beyond the stream, the white road climbs the wold above
Tetford, and disappears from sight. These _wolds_ are chalk; the greensand
ridge being all to the south of the valley, except just at Somersby and
Bag-Enderby, where the sandrock crops up by the roadside, and in the
little wood by the brook.
This small deep channelled brook with sandy bottom--over which one may on
any bright day see, as described in "Enid,"
a shoal
Of darting fish, that on a summer morn...
Come slipping o'er their shadows on the sand,
But if a man who stands upon the brink
But lift a shining hand against the sun,
There is not left the twinkle of a fin
Betwixt the cressy islets white with flower--
was very dear to Tennyson. When in his "Ode to Memory" he bids Memory
Come from the woods which belt the gray hillside,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father's door,
he adds:
And _chiefly_ from the brook that loves
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbèd sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn
In every elbow and turn,
The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland,
_O! hither lead thy feet!_
If we follow this
pastoral rivulet that swerves
To left and right thro' meadowy curves,
That feed the mothers of the flock,
we, too, shall hear
the livelong bleat
Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds
Upon the ridgèd wolds.
And shall see the cattle in the rich grass land, and mark on the right the
green-gray tower of Spilsby, where so many of the Franklin family lived
and died, the family of whom his future bride was sprung.
Still keeping by the brook, we shall see, past the tower of Bag-Enderby
which adjoins Somersby, "The gray hill side" rising up behind the Old Hall
of Harrington, and
The Quarry trenched along the hill
And haunted by the wrangling daw,
above which runs the chalky "ramper" or turnpike-road which leads along
the eastern ridge of the wold to Alford, whence you proceed across the
level Marsh to the sea at Mablethorpe.
_The Marsh_ in Lincolnshire is a word of peculiar significance. The whole
country is either _fen_, _wold_, or _marsh_. The wolds, starting from Keal
and Alford, run in two ridges on either side of the Somersby Valley, one
going north to Louth and onwards, and one west by Spilsby and Horncastle
to Lincoln. Here it joins the great spine-bone of the county on which,
straight as an arrow for many a mile northwards, runs the Roman Ermine
Street; and but for the Somersby brook these two ridges from Louth and
Lincoln would unite at Spilsby, whence the greensand formation, which
begins at Raithby, sends out two spurs, one eastwards, ending abruptly at
Halton, while the other pushes a couple of miles farther south, until at
Keal the road drops suddenly into the level fen, giving a view--east,
south, and west--of wonderful extent and colour, ending to the east with
the sea, and to the south with the tall pillar of Boston Church standing
up far above the horizon. This flat land is _the fen_; all rich cornland
and all well drained, but with few habitations, and with absolutely no
hill or even rise in the ground until, passing Croyland or Crowland Abbey,
which once dominated a veritable land of fens only traversable by boats,
you come, on the farther side of Peterborough, to the great North Road.
Such views as this from Keal, and the similar one from Lincoln Minster,
which looks out far to the south-west over a similar large tract of fen,
are not to be surpassed in all the land.
But the Poet's steps from Somersby would not as a rule go westwards. The
coast would oftener be his aim; and leaving Spilsby to the right, and the
old twice-plague-stricken village of Partney, where the Somersby rivulet
becomes a river, he would pass from "the high field on the bushless pike"
to Miles-cross-hill, whence the panorama unfolds which he has depicted in
Canto XI. of "In Memoriam":
Calm and still light on yon great plain,
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main.
Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across
the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to
Some lowly cottage whence we see
Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky.
This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called _the Marsh_, a
strip between five and eight miles wide, running parallel with the coast
from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from
the sandbuilt ridge
Of heaped hills that mound the sea.
This strip of land is not marsh in the ordinary sense of the word, but a
belt of the richest grass land, all level and with no visible fences, each
field being surrounded by a broad dyke or ditch with deep water, hidden in
summer by the tall feathery plumes of the "whispering reeds." Across this
belt the seawind sweeps for ever. The Poet may allude to this when, in his
early poem, "Sir Galahad," he writes:
But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o'er waste fens and windy fields;
and "the hard grey weather" sung by Kingsley breeds a race of hardy
gray-eyed men with long noses, the manifest descendants of the Danes who
peopled all that coast, and gave names to most of the villages there,
nine-tenths of which end in "by."
This rich pasture-land runs right up to the sand-dunes,--Nature's own
fortification made by the winds and waves which is just outside the Dutch
and Roman embankments, and serves better than all the works of man to keep
out the waters of the North Sea from the low-lying levels of the _Marsh_
and _Fen_.
The lines in the "Lotos-Eaters":
They sat them down upon the yellow sand
Between the sun and moon upon the shore,
describes what the Poet might at any time of full moon have seen from that
"sand-built ridge" with the red sun setting over the wide marsh, and the
full moon rising out of the eastern sea; and "The wide winged sunset of
the misty marsh" recalls one of the most noticeable features of that
particular locality, where, across the limitless windy plain, the sun
would set in regal splendour; and when "cold winds woke the gray-eyed
morn" his rising over the sea would be equally magnificent in colour.
Having crossed the "Marsh" by a raised road with deep wide dykes on either
side, and no vestige of hedge or tree in sight, except where a row of
black poplars or aspens form a screen from the searching wind round a
group of the plainest of farm buildings, red brick with roofing of black
glazed pan-tiles, you come to the once tiny village of Mablethorpe,
sheltering right under the sea-bank, the wind-blown sands of which are
held together by the penetrating roots of the tussocks of long, coarse,
sharp-edged grass, and the prickly bushes of sea buckthorn, gray-leaved
and orange-berried.
You top the sand-ridge, and below, to right and left, far as eye can see,
stretch the flat, brown sands. Across these the tide, which at the full of
the moon comes right up to the barrier, goes out for three-quarters of a
mile; of this the latter half is left by the shallow wavelets all ribbed,
as you see it on the ripple-marked stone of the Horsham quarries, and
shining with the bright sea-water which reflects the low rays of the sun;
while far off, so far that they seem to be mere toys, the shrimper slowly
drives his small horse and cart, to the tail of which is attached the
primitive purse net, the other end of it being towed by the patient,
long-haired donkey, ridden by a boy whose bare feet dangle in the shallow
wavelets. Farther to the south the tide ebbs quite out of sight. This is
at "Gibraltar Point," near Wainfleet Haven, where Somersby brook at length
finds the sea, a place very familiar to the Poet in his youth. The skin of
mud on the sands makes them shine like burnished copper in the level rays
of the setting sun, which here have no sandbank to intercept them, but at
other times it is a scene of dreary desolation, such as is aptly described
in "The Passing of Arthur":
a coast
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.
It was near this part of the shore that, as a young man, he often walked,
rolling out his lines aloud or murmuring them to himself, a habit which
was also that of Wordsworth, and led in each case to the peasants
supposing the Poet to be "craäzed," and caused the Somersby cook to wonder
"what Mr. Awlfred was always a-praying for," and caused also the
fisherman, whom he met on the sands once at 4 A.M. as he was walking
without hat or coat, and to whom he bid good-morning, to reply, "Thou poor
fool, thou doesn't knaw whether it be night or daä."
But at Mablethorpe the sea does not go out nearly so far, and at high tide
it comes right up to the bank with splendid menacing waves, the memory of
which furnished him, five and thirty years after he had left Lincolnshire
for ever, with the famous simile in "The Last Tournament":
as the crest of some slow-arching wave,
Heard in dead night along that table shore,
Drops flat, and after the great waters break
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing.
This accurately describes the flat Lincolnshire coast with its
"interminable rollers" breaking on the endless sands, than which waves the
Poet always said that he had never anywhere seen grander, and the clap of
the wave as it fell on the hard sand could be heard across that flat
country for miles. Doubtless this is what prompted the lines in "Locksley
Hall":
Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.
"We hear in this," says the "Lincolnshire Rector,"[4] writing in
_Macmillan's Magazine_ of December 1873, "the mighty sound of the breakers
as they fling themselves at full tide with long-gathered force upon the
slope sands of Skegness or Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, nowhere
is ocean grander in a storm; nowhere is the thunder of the sea louder, nor
its waves higher, nor the spread of their waters on the beach wider."
It is not only of the breakers that the Poet has given us pictures. Along
these sands it was his wont, no doubt, as it has often been that of the
writer,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray,
and it is still Skegness and Mablethorpe which may have furnished him with
his simile in "The Dream of Fair Women":
So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land
Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,
Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,
Torn from the fringe of spray.
Walking along the shore as the tide goes out, you come constantly on
creeks and pools left by the receding waves,
A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.[5]
or little dimpled hollows of brine, formed by the wind-swept water washing
round some shell or stone:
As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long
A little bitter pool about a stone
On the bare coast.[6]
Many characteristics of Lincolnshire scenery and of Somersby in particular
are introduced in "In Memoriam."
In Canto LXXXIX. the poet speaks of the hills which shut in the Somersby
Valley on the north:
Nor less it pleased in lustier moods
Beyond the bounding hill to stray.
In XCV. he speaks of the knolls, elsewhere described as "The hoary knolls
of ash and haw," where the cattle lie on a summer night:
Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd
The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease,
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:
and in Canto C. he calls to mind:
The sheepwalk up the windy wold,
and many other features seen in his walks with Arthur Hallam at Somersby.
In "Mariana" we have:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn,
About the lonely moated grange.
But no picture is more complete and accurate and remarkable than that of a
wet day in the Marsh and on the sands of Mablethorpe:
Here often when a child I lay reclined:
I took delight in this fair strand and free:
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships all seem'd to be.
And here again I come, and only find
The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,
Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.
From what we have said it will be clear to the reader that while it is the
_fen_ land only that the railway traveller sees, it is the _Marsh_ and the
_Wolds_--and particularly in Lord Tennyson's mind the Wolds--that make
the characteristic charm of the county, a charm of which so many
illustrations are to be found throughout his poems. Certainly in her wide
extended views, in the open wolds with the villages and their gray church
towers nestling in the sheltered nooks at the wold foot, and also (to
quote again from the "Lincolnshire Rector") "in her glorious parish
churches and gigantic steeples, Lincolnshire has charms and beauties of
her own. And as to fostering genius, has she not proved herself to be the
'meet nurse of a poetic child'? for here, be it remembered, here in the
heart of the land, in Mid-Lincolnshire, Alfred Tennyson was born, here he
spent all his earliest and freshest days; here he first felt the divine
afflatus, and found fit material for his muse:
The Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the Camp of Dan
between Zorah and Eshtaol."
II
THE SOMERSBY FRIENDS
We leave the well-beloved place
Where first we gazed upon the sky;
The roofs, that heard our earliest cry,
Will shelter one of stranger race.
* * * * *
I turn to go: my feet are set
To leave the pleasant fields and farms;
They mix in one another's arms
To one pure image of regret.
It is no wonder that the Tennysons loved Somersby. They were a large
family, and here they grew up together, making their own world and growing
ever more fond of the place for its associations. "How often have I
longed to be with you at Somersby!" writes Alfred Tennyson's sister,
Mary,[7] thirteen years after leaving the old home. "How delightful that
name sounds to me! Visions of sweet past days rise up before my eyes, when
life itself was new,
And the heart promised what the fancy drew."
Here, when childhood's happy days were over, the Tennyson girls rejoiced
in the society of their brothers' Cambridge friends, and, though the
village was so remote that they only got a post two or three times a
week,[8] here they not only drank in contentedly the beauty of the
country, but also passed delightful days with talk and books, with music
and poetry, and dance and song, when, on the lawn at Somersby, one of the
sisters
brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon.
Here, as Arthur Hallam said, "Alfred's mind was moulded in silent sympathy
with the everlasting forms of Nature."
I have said that they made their own world; and they were well able to do
it, for they were a very remarkable family. The Doctor was a very tall,
dark man, very strict with his boys, to whom he was schoolmaster as well
as parent. He was a scholar, and unusually well read, and possessed a good
library. Clever, too, he was with his hands, and carved the stone
chimney-piece in the dining-room, which his man Horlins built under his
direction. He and his wife were a great contrast, for she was very small
and gentle and highly sensitive.
Edward FitzGerald speaks of her as "one of the most innocent and
tender-hearted ladies I ever saw"; and the Poet depicts her in "Isabel,"
where he speaks of her gentle voice, her keen intellect and her
Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign
The summer calm of golden charity.
Mary was the letter-writer of the family, and a very clever woman, and her
letters show that she knew her Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and
Coleridge as well as her brother's poems.
They were a united family, but Charles and Alfred were nearest to her in
age. She writes to one of her great friends: "O my beloved, what creatures
men are! my brothers are the exception to this general rule." Accordingly,
of Charles she writes: "If ever there was a sweet delightful character it
is that dear Charley," and of Alfred: "A. is one of the noblest of his
kind. You know my opinion of men in general is much like your own; they
are not like us, they are naturally _more_ selfish and _not so
affectionate_." She adds:
Alfred is universally beloved by all his friends, and was long so
before he came to any fame....
We look upon him as the stay of the family; you know it is to him we
go when anything is to be done. Something lately occurred here which
was painful; we wrote to Alfred and he came immediately, after, I am
told, not speaking three days scarcely to any one from distress of
mind, and that _not_ for himself, mind, but for others. Did this look
like selfishness?
After leaving Somersby she felt the loss of these brothers sorely.
Alfred's devotion to his mother was always perfect. In October 1850 Mary
writes from Cheltenham:
Yesterday, Mamma, I, and Fanny went to look for houses, as Alfred has
written to say that he should like to live by his Mother or in the
same house with us, if we could get one large enough, and he would
share the rent, which would be a great deal better. He wishes us to
take a house in the neighbourhood of London, if we can give up ours,
with him, or to take a small house for him and Emily[9] on the
outskirts of Cheltenham till we can move; so what will be done I know
not, but this I know that Alfred must come here and choose for
himself, so we have written to him to come immediately, and we are
daily expecting him.
But though life at Cheltenham when the brothers were all away was dull for
Mary, it had not been so at Somersby; for there they had home interests
sufficient to keep them always occupied, and they were not without
neighbours. Ormsby was close at hand, to the north, where lived as Rector,
Frank Massingberd, afterwards Chancellor of Lincoln, a man of cultivation
and old-world courtesy. His wife Fanny was one of the charming Miss
Barings of Harrington, which was but a couple of miles off to the east.
Her sister Rosa was that "sole rose of beauty, loveliness complete," to
whom the Poet wrote such charming little birthday verses; and sixty-five
years afterwards Rosa, then Mrs. Duncombe Shafto, still spoke with
enthusiasm of those happy days. Mrs. Baring had married for her second
husband, Admiral Eden, a man of great conversational powers, and with a
very large circle of interesting friends. He took the old Hall of
Harrington, with its fine brick front, from the Cracrofts, who moved to
Hackthorn near Lincoln, and thus the families at Harrington and Somersby
saw a great deal of one another.
There were two Eden daughters, the strikingly handsome Dulcibella and her
sister, who looked after the house and its guests. Hence their nicknames
of "Dulce" and "Utile."
A mile or two beyond Harrington was Langton, where Dr. Johnson came to
visit his friend Bennet Langton, who died only seven years before Dr.
Tennyson came to Somersby. But, though the Langtons were friends of the
Doctor's, this was not a house the young people much frequented. Mary,
having come back to the old neighbourhood, writes from Scremby: "I am
going to Langton to-morrow to spend a few days with the Langtons, don't
you pity me? I hope I shall get something more out of Mrs. Langton than
Indeed, Yes, No!"
Adjoining Langton the Tennysons had friends in the Swans of Saucethorpe,
and a little farther eastwards was Partney, where George Maddison and his
mother lived. He was a hero, of whom tales were told of many courageous
deeds, such as his going single-handed and taking a desperate criminal
who, being armed, had barricaded himself in an old building and set all
the police at defiance. It was a question whether people most admired the
courage of the man or the beauty of his charming wife, Fanny, one of the
three good-looking daughters of Sir Alan Bellingham, who all found
husbands in that neighbourhood. In the Lincolnshire poem, "The Spinster's
Sweet-Arts," the Poet has immortalized their name:
Goä to the laäne at the back, and loök thruf Maddison's gaäte!
From Partney the hill rises to Dalby, where lived John Bourne, whose wife
was an aunt of the young Tennysons, and here they would meet the handsome
Miss Bournes of Alford; one, Margaret, was dark, the other was Alice, a
beautiful fair girl. They married brothers, Marcus and John Huish. Mrs.
John Bourne was the Doctor's sister Mary, and the young Tennysons would
have been oftener at Dalby had it been their Aunt Elizabeth Russell[10]
who lived there, of whom they always spoke in terms of the strongest
affection.
The old house at Dalby was burnt down in 1841. About this Mr. Marcus Huish
tells me that his mother wrote in a diary at the time:
_Jan. 5, 1841._--On this day Dalby House, the seat of the Bournes,
and round whose simple Church, standing embosomed in trees, my family,
including my dear sister Mary Hannah, lie buried, was burnt to the
ground;
and on the 7th Mrs. Huish wrote:
I have this morning received intelligence that the dear House at Dalby
was on Tuesday night burnt down, and is now a wreck. I feel very
deeply this disastrous circumstance, endeared as it was to me by ties
of time and association. Mr. Tennyson has written to me as follows on
this catastrophe.
The letter was a long one, two pages being left for it in the diary, but
unfortunately it was never copied in.
The villages here are very close together, and going from Partney, two
miles eastward, you come to Skendleby, where Sir Edward Brackenbury lived,
whose elder brother Sir John was Consul at Cadiz, and used to send over
some good pictures and some strong sherry, known by the diners-out as "the
Consul's sherry." The Rector of the next village of Scremby was also a
Brackenbury, and here Mary Tennyson most loved to visit. Mrs. Brackenbury,
whom she always calls "Gloriana," was adored by all who knew her. Mary
says, "She is so sweet a character, and she has always been so kind and so
anxious for our family ... I look upon her as already a saint." Two of the
Rectors of Halton had also been Brackenburys--a father and son in
succession, and they were followed by two generations of Rawnsleys--Thomas
Hardwicke and his son Drummond.
Adjoining Scremby is Candlesby, where Tennyson's genial friend, John
Alington, who had married another of the beautiful Miss Bellinghams, was
Rector; and within half a mile is Gunby, the delightful old home of the
Massingberds. In Dr. Tennyson's time Peregrine Langton, who had married
the heiress of the Massingberds and taken her name, was living there.
It was from Gunby that Algernon Massingberd disappeared, going to America
and never being heard of again, which gave rise to a romance in "Novel"
form, that came out many years later called _The Lost Sir Massingberd_.
Going on eastward still, by Boothby, where Dr. Tennyson's friends the
Walls family lived, in a house to which you drove up across the grass
pasture, the sheep grazing right up to the front door, a thing still
common in the Lincolnshire Marsh, you come to Burgh, with its magnificent
Church tower and old carved woodwork. Here was the house of Sir George
Crawford, and here from the edge of the high ground on which the Church
stands you plunge down on to the level Marsh across which, at five miles'
distance, is Skegness, at that time only a handful of fishermen's
cottages, with "Hildred's Hotel," one good house occupied by a large
tenant farmer, and a reed-thatched house right on the old Roman sea bank,
built by Miss Walls, only one room thick, so that from the same room she
could see both the sunrise and the sunset. Here all the neighbourhood at
different times would meet, and enjoy the wide prospect of sea and Marsh
and the broad sands and the splendid air. When the tide was out the only
thing to be seen, as far as eye could reach, were the two or three
fishermen, like specks on the edge of the sea, and the only sounds were
the piping of the various sea-birds, stints, curlews, and the like, as
they flew along the creeks or over the gray sand-dunes. Mablethorpe was
nearer to Somersby, but had no house of any size at which, as here, the
dwellers on the wold knew that they were always welcome.
But we have other houses to visit, so let us return by Burgh and Bratoft,
where above the chancel arch of the ugly brick Church is a remarkable
picture of the Spanish Armada, represented as a huge red dragon, with the
ships of Effingham's fleet painted in the corner of the picture.
Passing Bratoft, the next thing we come to is the Somersby brook, which
is here "the Halton River," and on the greensand ridge, overlooking the
fen as far as "Boston Stump," stands the fine Church of Halton Holgate. In
this Church, as at Harrington, Alfred as a boy must have seen the old
stone effigy of a Crusader as described in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After"
with his feet upon the hound,
Cross'd! for once he sailed the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride.
The road ascends the "hollow way" cut through the greensand, and a timber
footbridge is flung across it leading from the Church to the Rectory. Dr.
Tennyson could tell the story of how his old friend T. H. Rawnsley, the
Rector, and Mr. Eden, brother of the Admiral, being in London, looked in
at the great Globe in Leicester Square and heard a man lecturing on
Geology. They listened till they heard "This Greensand formation here
disappears" (he was speaking of Sussex) "and crops up again in an obscure
little village called Halton Holgate in Lincolnshire." "Come along, Eden!"
said the Rector; "this is a very stupid fellow."
Halton was the house, and Mr. and Mrs. Rawnsley the people, whom Dr.
Tennyson most loved to visit. She had been previously known to him as the
beautiful Miss Walls of Boothby. The Rector was the most genial and
agreeable of men, and her charm of look and manner made his wife a
universal favourite.
Here are two characteristic letters from Dr. Tennyson to Mr. Rawnsley:
_Tuesday 28th, 1826._
DEAR RAWNSLEY--In your not having come to see me for so many months,
when you have little or nothing to do but warm your shins over the
fire while I, unfortunately, am frozen or rather suffocated with Greek
and Latin, I consider myself as not only slighted but spifflicated.
You deserve that I should take no notice of your letter whatever, but
I will comply with your invitation partly to be introduced to the
agreeable and clever lady, but more especially to have the pleasure
of seeing Mrs. Rawnsley, whom, you may rest assured, I value
considerably more than I do you. Mrs. T. is obliged by your
invitation, but the weather is too damp and hazy, Mr. Noah,--so I
remain your patriarchship's neglected servant,
G. C. TENNYSON.
This letter was addressed to the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, Halton Parsonage.
The next was addressed to Halton Palace, and runs thus:
SOMERSBY, _Monday_.
DEAR RAWNSLEY--We three shall have great pleasure in dining with you
to-morrow. We hope, also, that Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and yourselves will
favour us with their and your company to dinner during their stay. I
like them very much, and shall be very happy to know more of
them.--Very truly yours,
G. C. TENNYSON.
_P.S._--How the devil do you expect that people are to get up at seven
o'clock in the morning to answer your notes? However, I have not kept
your Ganymede waiting.
The friendship between the families, which was further cemented when the
Rector's son Drummond married Kate Franklin, whose cousin, Emily Sellwood,
afterwards became the Poet's wife, has been maintained for three
generations. Alfred shared his father's opinion of Halton, and often wrote
both to the Rector and his wife. In one letter to her, after pleading a
low state of health and spirits as his reason for not joining her party at
Halton, he says: "At the same time, believe me it is not without
considerable uneasiness that I absent myself from a house where I visit
with greater pleasure than at any other in the country, if indeed I may be
said to visit any other."
After leaving Somersby, he wrote on Jan. 28, 1838, from High Beech, Epping
Forest:
MY DEAR MRS. RAWNSLEY--I have long been intending to write to you, for
I think of you a great deal, and if I had not a kind of antipathy
against taking pen in hand I would write to you oftener; but I am
nearly as bad in this way as Werner, who kept an express (horse and
man) from his sister at an inn for two months before he could prevail
upon himself to write an answer to her, and her letter to him was,
nevertheless, on family business of the last importance. But my chief
motive in writing to you now is the hope that I may prevail upon you
to come and see us as soon as you can. I understood from some of my
sisters that Mr. Rawnsley was coming in February to visit his friend
Sir Gilbert. Now I trust that you and Sophy will come with him--of
course he would not pass without calling, whether alone or not. I was
very sorry not to have seen Drummond. I wish he would have dropt me a
line a few days before, that I might have stayed at home and been
cheered with the sight of a Lincolnshire face; for I must say of
Lincolnshire, as Cowper said of England,
With all thy faults I love thee still.
You hope our change of residence is for the better. The only advantage
in it is that one gets up to London oftener. The people are
sufficiently hospitable, but it is not in a good old-fashioned way, so
as to do one's feelings any good. Large set dinners with stores of
venison and champagne are very good things of their kind, but one
wants something more; and Mrs. Arabin seems to me the only person
about who speaks and acts as an honest and true nature dictates: all
else is artificial, frozen, cold, and lifeless.
Now that I have said a good word for Lincolnshire and a bad one for
Essex, I hope I have wrought upon your feelings, and that you will
come and see us with Mr. Rawnsley. Pray do. You could come at the same
time with Miss Walls when she pays her visit to the Arabins, and so
have all the inside of the mail to yourselves; for though you were
very heroic last summer on the high places of the diligence, I presume
that this weather is sufficient to cool any courage down to
zero.--Believe me, with love from all to all, always yours,
A. TENNYSON.
BEECH HILL, HIGH BEECH, LOUGHTON, ESSEX.
To this letter Mrs. Tennyson, the Poet's mother, adds a postscript, though
she complains that Alfred has scarcely left her room to do so. The letter
is dated in her hand.