with Rosa Baring, were two of Alfred's favourite partners at the Spilsby
and Horncastle balls. Sophy Rawnsley became Mrs. Ed. Elmhirst; she often
talked of the old Halton and Somersby days. "He was," she said, "so
interesting, because he was so unlike other young men; and his
unconventionality of manner and dress had a charm which made him more
acceptable than the dapper young gentleman of the ordinary type at ball or
supper party. He was a splendid dancer, for he loved music, and kept such
time; but you know," she would say, "we liked to talk better than to dance
together at Horncastle, or Spilsby, or Halton; he always had something
worth saying, and said it so quaintly." Rosa at eighty-three recalled the
same times with animation, and said to me, "You know we used to spoil him,
for we sat at his feet and worshipped him; and he read to us, and how well
he read! and when he wrote us those little poems we were more than proud.
Ah, those days at Somersby and Harrington and Halton, how delightful they
were!"
The Halton family were a decade younger than Charles, Alfred, and Mary
Tennyson, but Drummond married eight years before Alfred. Emily Sellwood,
just before her marriage with Alfred, wrote to Mrs. Drummond Rawnsley:
MY DEAREST KATIE--You and Drummond are among the best and kindest
friends I have in the world, and let me not be ungrateful, I have some
very good and very kind--Thy loving sister
EMILY.
The use of the _thy_ is very frequent with the Sellwoods, and in all Mary
Tennyson's letters too.
It was at Halton, in the time of its next Rector, Drummond Rawnsley, that
the farmer Gilbey Robinson gave his son Canon H. D. Rawnsley the famous
advice which the Poet has preserved in his Lincolnshire poem "The
Churchwarden and the Curate":
But creeäp along the hedge bottoms an thou'll be a Bishop yit.
And it was at Halton that Mr. Hoff, a large tenant farmer, lived of whom
Dr. Tennyson heard many a story from the Rector. He was quite a character,
and the Lord Chancellor Brougham was brought over by Mr. Eden from
Harrington to see and talk with him. I knew Mr. Hoff, and have heard the
Rector describe the lively afternoon they had. Farming was one of Lord
Brougham's hobbies, and he talked of farming to his heart's content, and
was delighted with the old fellow's shrewdness and independence, and his
racy sayings in the Lincolnshire dialect, the kind of sayings which
Tennyson has preserved in his "Northern Farmer." The farmer, too, was
pleased with his visitor, but he said to the Rector afterwards, "He is
straänge cliver mon is Lord Brougham, and he knaws a vast, noä doubt, but
he knaws nowt about ploughing." It was the same farmer who was introduced
by the Rector to the leading Barrister at the Spilsby sessions, where both
the Rector and Dr. Tennyson were always in request to dine with the bar,
when the Judge was at Spilsby, for the charm of their presence and the
brightness of their conversation. Mr. Hoff had seen "Councillor Flowers"
in Court in his wig and gown, but meeting him now in plain clothes, and
finding him a very small man, he said to him straight out, "Why, you're
nobbut a meän-looking little mon after all." These tenant farmers, whether
in the Marsh, wold, or fen, were very considerable people in days when
agriculture was at its best. In the Marsh, one in particular, Marshal
Heanley, was always termed the Marsh King. He it was who at the Ram-show
dinner at Halton, when Ed. Stanhope, the Minister for War, had spoken of
the future which was opening for the great agriculturists, and, after
alluding to Lord Brougham's visit to the Shire and the sending of some
farmers' sons to the Bar, had suggested the possibility of one of them
arriving at the top of the tree and sitting some day on the Woolsack. The
"Marsh King" got up and said, "I allus telled yer yer must graw wool; but
when you've grawed it, yer mustn't sit on it, yer must sell it."
There was a good deal of humour and also of characteristic independence
about both the farmers and their men in those days; the Doctor's own man,
when found fault with, had flung the harness in a heap on the drawing-room
floor, saying, "Cleän it yersen then." And at Halton Rectory an old
Waterloo cavalryman was coachman, who kept in the saddle-room the sword he
had drawn at Quatre-Bras, a delight to us boys to see and hear about. He
had a way of thinking aloud, and when, driving once at Skegness, he saw
the Halton schoolmaster, his particular aversion, Mrs. Rawnsley heard him
say, "If there ain't that conceäted aäpe of ourn." On a later occasion,
when, at a rent-day dinner, he was handing round the beer, and the
schoolmaster asked, "Is it ale or porter?" in a voice heard by all the
table he replied, "It's näyther aäle nor poörter, but very good beer, much
too good for the likes o' you, so taäke it and be thankful." Perhaps his
most famous saying was addressed to my younger brother who, when
attempting to copy his elders who always jumped the quickset hedge
opposite the saddle-room as a short cut to the house, had stuck in the
thorns and cried, "Grayson, Grayson, come and help me out!" The old man
slowly wiped his hands, and with his usual deliberation said, "Yis, I'm
a-coming." "But look sharp, confound you, it's pricking me." "Oh, if
you're going to sweër you may stay theër, and be damned to you."
From Halton the way is short to Spilsby, the market town where the
Franklins had lived, and the statue of Sir John resting his hand on an
anchor looks down every Monday on the chaffering Market folk at one end of
the Market Place, whilst the women still crowd round the old Butter-cross
at the other end. In the Church is the Willoughby chapel, full of
interesting monuments.
Many of the Franklin family lie in the Churchyard, and on the Church wall
are three tablets to the three most distinguished brothers,--James, the
soldier, who made the first ordnance survey of India; Sir Willingham, the
Judge of the Supreme Court of Madras; and Sir John, the discoverer of the
North-West Passage. Hundleby adjoins Spilsby where Mr. John Hollway lived,
of whom the Poet wrote: "People say and I feel that you are the man with
the finest taste and knowledge in literary matters here." Next to Hundleby
comes Raithby, the home of the Edward Rawnsleys, where the Poet was a
frequent visitor, and thence passing Mavis-Enderby on the left, the road
runs on the Ridge of the Wold through Hagworthingham to Horncastle, the
home of the Sellwoods. Mavis-Enderby is referred to in Jean Ingelow's
poem, "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571":
Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!
* * * * *
The brides of Mavis Enderby.
After a visit to Raithby in 1874 Alfred wrote to Mrs. Edward Rawnsley:
MY DEAR MARY--I stretch out arms of love to you all across the
distance,--all the Rawnsleys are dear to me, and you, though not an
indigenous one, have become a Rawnsley, and I invoke you in the same
embrace of the affection, tho' memory has not so much to say about
you.
At Keal, east of Mavis-Enderby, the Cracrofts, whom the Doctor knew well,
were living; and below the far-famed Keal Hill, in the flat fen, lay
Hagnaby Priory, the home of Thomas Coltman, whose nephews Tom and George
were often there. George, a genial giant of the heartiest kind, became
Rector of Stickney, half-way between Keal and Boston; he was one of the
Poet's closest friends. In a letter to the Rector of Halton he says,
"Remember me to all old friends, particularly to George Coltman"; and in
after years he seldom met a Lincolnshire man without asking, "How is
George Coltman? He was a good fellow." Agricultural depression has altered
things in Lincolnshire. Among the farmers the larger holders have
disappeared in many places, and in the pleasant homes of Halton and
Somersby, such men as the Rectors in those Georgian and early Victorian
days, Nature does not repeat.
The departure of the Tennyson family made a blank which could never be
filled. The villagers whom they left behind never forgot them, and even in
extreme old age they were still full of memories of the family, and talked
of the learning and cleverness of "the owd Doctor," the fondness of the
children for their mother and, most noticeable of all, their
"book-larning,"
And boöks, what's boöks? thou knaws thebbe naither 'ere nor theer.
The old folk all seemed to think that "to hev owt to do wi boöks" was a
sign of a weak intellect. "The boys, _poor things!_ they would allus hev a
book i' their hands as they went along." A few years ago there was still
one old woman in Somersby who remembered going, seventy-one years back,
when she was eleven years old, for her first place to the Tennysons. What
she thought most of was "the young laädies." She was blind, but she said,
"I can see 'em all now plaän as plaän; and I would have liked to hear Mr.
Halfred's voice ageän--sich a voice it wer."
[Illustration: FREDERICK TENNYSON.]
TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS FREDERICK AND CHARLES
By CHARLES TENNYSON[11]
My uncle Frederick lived near St. Heliers, and my father and I visited
him (1887) in his house, overlooking the town and harbour of St.
Heliers, Elizabeth Castle, and St. Aubyn's Bay. The two old brothers
talked much of bygone days; of the "red honey gooseberry," and the
"golden apples" in Somersby garden, and of the tilts and tourneys they
held in the fields; of the old farmers and "swains"; of their college
friends; and of the waste shore at Mablethorpe: and then turned to
later days, and to the feelings of old age. My father said of
Frederick's poems that "they were organ-tones echoing among the
mountains." Frederick told Alfred as they parted that "not for twenty
years had he spent such a happy day."--_Tennyson: a Memoir, by his
Son._
To C. T.
True poet, surely to be found
When Truth is found again.
Of all the brothers of Alfred Tennyson the closest akin to him were
Frederick and Charles. The three were born in successive years, Frederick
in 1807, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. They slept together in a
little attic under the roof of the old white Rectory at Somersby, they
played together, read together, studied together under the guidance of
their father, and all three left home to go together to the school at
Louth, which Alfred and Charles at least held in detestation until their
latest years. Frederick was the first to break up the brotherhood, for,
in 1817, he left Louth for Eton, but to the end of his long life--he
outlived all his brothers--he seems to have looked back on the days of his
childhood through the medium of this fraternal trinity. Years afterwards
he wrote of their common submission to the influence of Byron, who "lorded
it over them, with an immitigable tyranny," and a fire at Farringford in
1876 brings to his mind the destruction of their Aunt Mary's house at
Louth, in the gardens of which he wrote: "I, and Charles, and Alfred,
enthusiastic children, used to play at being Emperors of China, each
appropriating a portion of the old echoing garden as our domain, and
making them reverberate our tones of authority."
At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took
little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and
strength would have well qualified them to excel, and passed their time
chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat shores of
their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship
to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by
the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the _Poems by Two
Brothers_, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the
author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John's, Cambridge (his
father's old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was
published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the £10 which the
publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite
Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoarse on the shore as they
rolled out poem by poem in one another's ears. The notes and headings to
the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which
the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the
volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from
Byron, five from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece
from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with
others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa's _Voyages_, Beattie,
Rennel's _Herodotus_, Savary's _Letters_, Tacitus' _Annals_, Pliny,
Suetonius' _Lives of the Caesars_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, Racine,
the _Mysteries of Udolpho_, _La Auruncana_, the _Songs of Jayadeva_, Sir
William Jones (_History of Nadir Shah_, _Eastern Plants_, and _Works_,
vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful_, Dr.
Langhorne's _Collins_, Mason's _Caractacus_, Rollin, Contino's _Epitaph on
Camoens_, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young,
Sale's Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli's _Curiosities of
Literature_, Sallust, Terence, Lucretius, Coxe's _Switzerland_, Rousseau,
the _Ranz des Vaches_, _Baker on Animalculae_, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd scraps
of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.
Alfred and Charles followed Frederick to Cambridge in 1828 and entered
Trinity, whither their elder brother had just migrated from John's. All
the three brothers attained a certain amount of rather unconventional
distinction at the University; Frederick, who had taken a high place on
his entrance into Eton and subsequently became Captain of the Oppidans,
obtained the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode (in Sapphic metre) on the
Pyramids, the last cadence of which, "[Greek: ollumenôn gar achthôn
exapoleitai]," is the only fragment which tradition has preserved. Charles
obtained a Bell Scholarship in 1829, chiefly through the beauty of his
translations into English (one line, "And the ruddy grape shall droop from
the desert thorn," was always remembered by Alfred), and the youngest
brother secured, as is well known, the University Prize for English Verse
with his "Timbuctoo." None of the brothers, however, attained great
distinction in the schools, though Frederick and Charles graduated B.A. in
1832. With the end of their Cambridge careers the brotherhood finally
dissolved. It was at first proposed that all three should (in deference to
the wish of their grandfather), become clergymen. Frederick had always
shown a certain independence and intractability of character. At Eton,
though a skilful and ardent cricketer, he acquired a reputation for
eccentricity, and Sir Francis Doyle describes him as "rather a silent,
solitary boy, not always in perfect harmony with Keate,"--a gentleman with
whom most spirits, however ardent, generally found it convenient to agree.
Sir Francis recounts one typical incident: Frederick, then in the sixth
form, had returned to school four days late after the Long Vacation. Keate
sent for him and demanded an explanation. None was forthcoming. Keate
stormed in his best manner, his prominent eyebrows shooting out, and his
Punch-like features working with fury, Frederick remaining all the while
cynically calm. Finally the fiery doctor insists with many objurgations on
a written apology from the boy's father, whereupon the culprit leisurely
produces a crumpled letter from his pocket and hands it coolly to the
head-master. A fresh tirade follows, accusing Frederick of every defect of
character and principle known to ethics, and concluding, "_and showing
such a temper too_"!
How little Frederick regarded himself as fitted for Holy Orders may be
judged from a letter he wrote in 1832 to his friend John Frere: "I
expect," he says, "to be ordained in June, without much reason, for
hitherto I have made no kind of preparation, and a pretty parson I shall
make, I'm thinking." The grandfather came apparently to share this
conclusion, for the ordination never took place.
It must have been about this time that Frederick made the acquaintance of
Edward FitzGerald, who was two years his junior. The pair maintained a
close correspondence for many years, and "Fitz" became godfather to one of
his friend's sons and left a legacy to be divided among his three
daughters.
Frederick's fine presence and frank, tempestuous, independent nature seem
to have made a powerful appeal to the younger man, for he had the great
height, noble proportions, and dome-like forehead of the Tennyson family,
and was so robustly built that it is said that in later years, when he
lived in Florence, a new servant girl, on seeing him for the first time
speeding up his broad Italian staircase in British knee-breeches, fell
back against the wall in astonishment, exclaiming, "Santissima Madonna,
che gambe!" Unlike his brothers, however, his hair (which he wore rather
longer than was common even at that time) was fair and his eyes blue.
"I remember," wrote Fitz in 1843, "the days of the summer when you and
I were together quarrelling and laughing.... Our trip to Gravesend has
left a perfume with me. I can get up with you on that everlastingly
stopping coach on which we tried to travel from Gravesend to Maidstone
that Sunday morning: worn out with it we got down at an Inn and then
got up on another coach, and an old smiling fellow passed us holding
out his hat--and you said, "That old fellow must go about as Homer
did," and numberless other turns of road and humour, which sometimes
pass before me as I lie in bed."
And in the next year he writes:
How we pulled against each other at Gravesend! You would stay--I
wouldn't--then I would--then we did. Do you remember that girl at the
bazaar ... then the gentleman who sang at Ivy Green?
And seven years later Gravesend and its [Greek: anêrithmoi] shrimps are
still in his memory.
Very soon, however, after leaving Cambridge, Frederick, who had inherited
a comfortable property at Grimsby, set out for Italy, and in Italy and
near the Mediterranean he remained, with the exception of an occasional
visit to England, until 1859.
He was passionately fond of travel, which, as he used to say, "makes
pleasure solemn and pain sweet," and even his marriage in 1839 to Maria
Giuliotti, daughter of the chief magistrate of Siena, could not induce him
to make a settled home. In 1841 we hear of him (through "Fitz") in Sicily,
playing a cricket match against the crew of the _Bellerophon_ on the
Parthenopaean Hills, and "_sacking_ the sailors by ninety runs." "I like
that such men as Frederick should be abroad," adds the writer, "so strong,
haughty, and passionate," and in 1842 "Fitz" pictures him "laughing and
singing, and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of
the warm South." All the while he continued to write to FitzGerald
"accounts of Italy, finer" (says the latter) "than any I ever heard."
Once he describes himself coming suddenly upon Cicero's Formian villa,
with its mosaic pavement leading through lemon gardens down to the sea,
and a little fountain bubbling up "as fresh as when its silver sounds
mixed with the deep voice of the orator sitting there in the stillness of
the noonday, devoting the siesta hours to study." FitzGerald replies with
letters full of affection; he sighs for Frederick's "Englishman's
humours"--for their old quarrels: "I mean quarrel in the sense of a good,
strenuous difference of opinion, supported on either side by occasional
outbursts of spleen. Come and let us try," he adds, "you used to irritate
my vegetable blood." "I constantly think of you," he writes, "and as I
have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love I feel towards but two
or three friends ... you, Spedding, Thackeray, and only one or two more."
And again: "It is because there are so few F. Tennysons in the world that
I do not like to be wholly out of hearing of the one I know.... I see so
many little natures that I must draw to the large."
All this time Frederick was writing verse and Fitz constantly urges him to
publish. "You are now the only man I expect verse from," he writes in
1850, after he had given Alfred up as almost wholly fallen from grace.
"Such gloomy, grand stuff as you write." Again: "We want some bits of
strong, genuine imagination.... There are heaps of single lines, couplets,
and stanzas that would consume the ----s and ----s like stubble."
Much of their correspondence is taken up with the discussion of music.
They both agree in placing Mozart above all other composers. Beethoven
they find too analytical and erudite. Original, majestic, and profound,
they acknowledge him, but at times bizarre and morbid.
"We all raved about Byron, Shelley, and Keats," wrote Frederick long
after, in 1885, "but none of them have retained their hold on me with the
same power as that little tone poet with the long nose, knee-breeches, and
pigtail." Indeed he was at different times told by two mediums that the
spirit of Mozart in these same knee-breeches and pigtail accompanied him,
invisibly to the eye of sense, as a familiar. Music was the passion of
Frederick Tennyson's life. It was said among his friends that when he
settled in Florence (as he did soon after 1850), he lived in a vast Hall
designed by Michael Angelo, surrounded by forty fiddlers, and he used to
improvise on a small organ until he was over eighty years of age.
"After all," he wrote in 1874, "Music is the Queen of the Arts. What
are all the miserable concrete forms into which we endeavour to throw
'thoughts too deep for tears' or too rapturous for mortal mirth,
compared with the divine, abstract, oceanic utterances of that voice
which can multiply a thousandfold and exhaust in infinite echoes the
passions that on canvas, in marble, or even in poesy (the composite
style in aesthetics), so often leave us cold and emotionless! I
believe Music to be as far above the other Arts as the affections of
the soul above the rarest ingenuity of the perfect orator! Perhaps you
are far from agreeing with me. Indeed the common charge brought
against her by her sisters among the Pierides--and by the
transcendentalists and philosophical Critics--is that She has no type
like the other Arts on which to model her creations and to regulate
her inspirations. I say her inexhaustible spring is the soul itself,
and its fiery inmost--the chamber illuminated from the centre of
Being--as the finest and most subtle ethers are begotten of, and flow
nearest to the Sun."
Frederick lived at Florence till 1857 and found there, after years of
wandering, his first settled home. The idea of settling tickled his
humour, and in 1853 he writes: "I am a regular family man now with four
children (the last of whom promises to be the most eccentric of a humorous
set) and an Umbrella." In Florence he came in contact with Caroline Norton
and her son Brinsley, of the latter of whom he writes an amusing account:
Young Norton has married a peasant girl of Capri, who, not a year ago,
was scampering bare-footed and bare-headed over the rocks and shingles
of that island. He has turned Roman Catholic among other
accomplishments--being in search, he said, of a "graceful faith."...
Parker has just published a volume of his which he entitled "Pinocchi:
or Seeds of the Pine," meaning that out of this small beginning he,
Brin, would emerge, like the pine, which is to be "the mast of some
great Admiral," from its seedling. He is quite unable to show the
applicability of this title, and, seeing that the book has been very
severely handled in one of the periodicals under the head of "Poetical
Nuisances," some are of opinion that "Pedocchi" would have been a more
fitting name for it. However, to do him no injustice, he has sparks of
genius, plenty of fancy and improvable stuff in him, and is, moreover,
a young gentleman of that irrepressible buoyancy which, to use the
language of the _Edinburgh Review_, "rises by its own rottenness...."
As I said, he is not more than three-and-twenty, but is very much in
the habit of commencing narrative in this manner: "In my young days
when I used to eat off gold plate!" to which I reply, "Really a fine
old gentleman like you should have more philosophy than to indulge in
vain regrets."