famous Caroline, his mother, who, not to speak of her personal
attractions, is really, I should say, a woman of genius, if only
judged by her novel, _Stuart of Dunleath_, which is full of deep
pathos to me. I asked Brin one day what his mother thought of me. He
stammers very much, and he said, "She th-th-th-thinks very well of
you, but I d-d-don't think she likes your family." "Good heavens!
here's news," I said. Well, afterwards she told me of having met
Alfred at Rogers', and of having heard that he had taken a dislike to
her. "Why, Mrs. Norton," I said, "that must be nearly thirty years
ago, and do you harbour vindictive feelings so long?" "Oh!" she said,
"why, I'm not thirty!"
Again, one day we met her in a country house where we were invited to
meet her, and soon after she had shaken hands with me she said, with a
dubious kind of jocosity, "I should like to see all the Tennysons hung
up in a row before the Villa Brichieri." Upon the whole, I thought her
a strange creature, and she has not yet lost her beauty--a grand
Zenobian style certainly, but, like many celebrated beauties, she
seems to have won the whole world. Among other things she said in
allusion to some incident, "What mattered it to me whether it was an
old or a young man--I who all my life have made conquests?" It seemed
to me that to dazzle in the great world was her principal ambition,
and literary glory her second.[12]
But Frederick was too much of a man of moods to care for society. He used
to describe himself as a "person of gloomy insignificance and unsocial
monomania." Society he dismissed contemptuously as "Snookdom," and would
liken it gruffly to a street row. The "high-jinks of the high-nosed" (to
use another phrase of his) angered him, as did all persons "who go about
with well-cut trousers and ill-arranged ideas." The consequence was that
his acquaintance in Florence long remained narrow. In 1854, shortly after
the birth of his second son, he wrote:
Sponsors I have succeeded in hooking, one in this manner: A friend of
mine called yesterday and introduced a Mr. Jones. "Sir," said I,
"happy to see you. Like to be a godfather?" "Really," he said, not
quite prepared for the honour, "do my best." "Thank you, then I'll
call for you on my way to the church"; so Mr. Jones was booked.
One hears, however, of a visit of Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide Kemble) in 1854.
"I had not seen her for twenty years," writes Frederick; "she is grown
colossal, but all her folds of fat have not extinguished the love of music
in her." But one friendship which Frederick made in Florence was destined
to be a lifelong pleasure to him. In 1853 he writes:
The Brownings I have but recently become acquainted with. They really
are the very best people in the world, and a real treasure to that
Hermit, a Poet. Browning is a wonderful man with inexhaustible memory,
animal spirits, and bonhomie. He is always ready with the most apropos
anecdote, and the happiest bon mot, and his vast acquaintance with
out-of-the-way knowledge and the quaint Curiosity Shops of Literature
make him a walking encyclopaedia of marvels. Mrs. B., who never goes
out--being troubled like other inspired ladies with a chest--is a
little unpretending woman, yet full of power, and, what is far better,
loving-kindness; and never so happy as when she can get into the thick
of mysterious Clairvoyants, Rappists, Ecstatics, and Swedenborgians.
Only think of their having lived full five years at Florence with all
these virtues hidden in a bushel to me!
In 1854 he published his first volume of verse, _Days and Hours_. The book
was, on the whole, well received. Charles Kingsley (whose early and
discriminating recognition of the merits of George Meredith places him
high among the critics of his day) wrote: "The poems are the work of a
finished scholar, of a man who knows all schools, who has profited more or
less by all, and who often can express himself, while revelling in
luxurious fancies, with a grace and terseness which Pope himself might
have envied." There was, however, a good deal of adverse criticism, and it
was probably mainly owing to his irritation at many of the strictures
(often futile enough) which were passed upon him at this time that he kept
silence for the next thirty-six years. At any rate, he was always ready to
the end of his life for a growl or a thunder at the critics.
In 1857 Frederick Tennyson left Florence and after spending some time in
Pisa and Genoa finally settled in Jersey, where he made his home for
nearly forty years. During all this period he maintained a regular and
detailed correspondence with Mrs. Brotherton, the wife of his friend
Augustus Brotherton, the artist, with whom he had begun to exchange
letters while still at Florence. His life was now a very quiet one, for,
except for an occasional visit to England, he never left home. His
children with their families visited him from time to time. His brother
Charles came with his wife to see him in 1867, as did the Brownings on
their way to Italy, and Alfred also paid him visits, the last of which was
in 1892. On the whole, however, his days, for one who had been so
passionately fond of travel and of a life of colour, warmth, and
excitement, were singularly peaceful. But he retained to the last his
astonishing vitality. His health remained tolerably good in spite of the
nervous irritability and reactions of melancholy which were inseparable
from the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his temperament. "Poor
Savile Morton used to stare at me with wonder," he writes. "'I cannot
conceive,' he said, 'how a man with such a stomach can be subject to
hypochondria.'" In 1867, at the age of sixty, he batted for an hour to his
nephew Lionel's bowling, hoping thereby to be able "to revive the cricket
habit," and his mind continued extraordinarily active; not a movement in
world politics or thought escaped him; he read voraciously and continued
to write verse in a rather desultory fashion. His appetite for beauty,
too, remained as keen as ever and even developed. "The longer I live," he
wrote in 1885, "the more delicate become my perceptions of beautiful
nature." And that appetite found ample food in the scenery of the bowery
island, the whole ambit of which, with its curling tree-tops and distant
lawny spaces dappled with sunshine and surrounded, as it seemed, by the
whole immensity of the globe, could be seen from a point near his house.
In his isolation, however, his active mind tended to become more and more
possessed by certain ideas, with which everything he read and heard was
brought into relation. While still at Florence he had (possibly under the
influence of Mrs. Browning) become greatly interested in the teachings of
Swedenborg and the phenomena of spiritualism which seemed to him a natural
development of Swedenborg's theories. At first he was apt to speak rather
lightly of spirit revelations. In 1852 he wrote to Alfred:
"Powers the sculptor here, who is a Swedenborgian, says he once had a
vision of two interwoven angels upon a ground of celestial azure
clearly revealed to him by supernatural light after he had put out his
candle and was lying awake in bed, and believes that these are only
the beginning of wonders; the spirits themselves announce the dawn of
a new time and the coming of the Millennium, and he firmly believes
that all we now do by costly material processes will in the returning
Golden Age of the world be accomplished for us by ministering spirits.
'Thou shalt see the angels of heaven ascending and descending on the
Son of man.' I go with him as far as to believe that these are
spiritual revelations, but I confess I cannot accompany him in his
belief in their beneficent intentions. God speaks to the heart of man
by His Spirit, not thro' table legs; the miracles of Christ were of
inestimable worth, but these unfortunate ghosts either drivel like
schoolgirls or bounce out at once into the most shameful falsehoods,
and by their actual presence, pretending to be in their final state,
they seem to have for their object, tho' they carefully avoid touching
on those subjects, to undermine in the hearts of Christians the
spiritual doctrines of the Resurrection of the spiritual body and of
the judgment to come. And the more effectually to unsettle the old
Theology, the cant of these spirits is that God is a God of Love,
Love, Love, continually repeated _ad nauseam_. So He is, but 'My
thoughts are not your thoughts, nor My ways your ways,' 'He scourgeth
every son that He receiveth,' 'He loveth those whom He chasteneth,'
'it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,' 'the
pitiful God trieth the hearts and the reins.' But these spirits, by
for ever harping upon the Love of God in their insipid language, seem
to me to be anxious to persuade us that He is a 'fine old country
gentleman with large estate,' or something of that kind, seated in a
deeply-cushioned armchair, and patting the heads of His rebellious
children when they come whimpering to Him, yielding to anything in the
shape of intercession, and, rather than that St. Joseph or any other
saint should be offended, ready to admit a brigand into Heaven. So
that I thoroughly distrust your spirits and expect no virtue will come
out of them. They only seem to me last links in the chain of modern
witchcrafts which will probably end with the Devil."[13] And a little
later he writes: "Owen the Socialist and a host of infidels by a
peculiar logical process of their own, after seeing a table in motion,
instantly believe in the immortality of the Soul. To me it is
astounding and even awful, that in this nineteenth century after
Christ--whose resurrection of the body rests on as strong a ground of
proof as many of the best attested historical events--men should be
beginning again with that vague and unsatisfactory phantom of a creed
which must have been old in the time of Homer."
It was not long before he became a complete convert to Swedenborgianism
and firmly convinced of the reality of the Spiritualistic phenomena with
which the press and literature of the day began to be flooded. Indeed at
one time he believed that spirits communicated with himself by a kind of
electrical ticking, which he was constantly hearing in his room at night,
and used at their dictation to do a certain amount of automatic writing.
The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that he was forced to
conclude the spirits to be of an evil and untrustworthy nature, and he
therefore abandoned the practice of spiritualism altogether. He remained,
however, convinced of the fact that living men were able to communicate
with the spirits of the departed, who had been able, since the end (in
1757) of the second dispensation (according to Swedenborg) and the
abolition of the intermediate state of purgatory which accompanied it, to
establish direct intercourse with our world, and he believed that this
rapid increase of communication was a sign of the approach of the kingdom
of heaven, that is to say, of the total abolition of all barriers between
the material and spiritual worlds, and the actual physical regeneration of
man in the Millennium predicted by Christ and the prophets. The natural
and political tumults of which the nineteenth century was so prolific
seemed to him to point in the same direction, and to fall in with the
prophecy of Daniel which he was never tired of quoting.
Frederick abandoned these views at the end of his life, but it is not
difficult to see how they came to acquire such a hold on him. He was
essentially a mystic and clung most fervently to the belief in a future
life, where all good things should be taken up into the spiritual life and
glorified.
"My daylight," he wrote in 1853, "is sombered by a natural instinct of
unearthliness, a looking backwards and forwards for that sunny land
which Imagination robes in unfailing Summer where no tears dim the
Light, and no graves lie underneath our feet, by the side of which
Riches, honors, even Health the first of blessings, all, in short,
that is commonly called Happiness, looks cold and imperfect--while
the great Shadow of Death fills up the distance, and the steps to it
lie over withered garlands and dry bones." And again: "For an
illustration of the bliss and delight of that higher state of being
which under the influence of that Spirit-Sun shall hereafter rise
daily to its appointed task, whatever that may be, with full heart and
mind--I go back to 'the days that are no more,' when I used to dive
into the sunny morn, rejoicing in my strength, refreshed with
dreamless sleep 'like a giant with wine,' carrying my whole soul with
me without fears or regrets, with a joy focussed like sunlight through
a lens, on the infinite present moment! Such memories, tho' mournful,
are blessed if they bring with them analogies of the 'Higher State to
Be.' For the angel is but the infant sublimated--the rapture and the
innocence, with the Wisdom and the Power adjoined, and crowned with
Immortality! That is to say his will being in all things conformable
to the Divine--he receives the divine influences which are heaven! And
surely my unshakable belief is that all created beings--even those who
have chosen the lowest Hell--will be eventually redeemed, exalted, and
glorified--or there would be an Infinite Power of Good unable or
unwilling to subdue Finite Evil."
His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of
orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the "frowzy diatribes of
black men with white ties--too often the only white thing about them" (one
can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the "little papacies" that
dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive
hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape
his wrath.
Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the
original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even
greater bitterness, as the following letter shows:
This, as you truly say, is the age of Atheism--both practical and
professional. But it is not only Bradlaugh and Mrs. ---- who
distinguish it as such--multitudes of most worthy and respectable
people (in their own estimation) are classifiable under this
category. Indeed all worldly people whose religion consists in saving
appearances, all self-interested folk whose lives are passed in
struggles with their neighbour for their own advantage--all such as
wear down heart and mind and even physical well-being in the feverish
ambition to pile up riches, not knowing who shall gather them or
purely for the renown of possessing them. All ritualists who think
they get to heaven by peculiar haberdashery, and intoning the prayers,
which makes a farce of them by depriving them of articulate meaning.
All believers in the vicarious atonement of faith alone, which creed
signifies that all _has been done_ instead of all has _to be done_ for
them. All who hurry to conventicles on Sunday with gilt-edged
prayer-books, and begin on Monday morning to slander, ill-treat, or
cheat their neighbours. In short all that excludes the spiritual from
_this_ life--which generally indicates unbelief in any other and
virtually denies the _necessity_, and therefore the existence, of a
Divine Governor. All Professors ---- and ---- in Physical science, all
Herbert Spencers, etc. in metaphysical--who arrive by different
courses at the same conclusion, viz. that God is _unknowable_ [_sic_]
and that therefore they need not take the trouble to know Him. All
this is but Atheism virtual and avowed.
And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should have come to regard the
phenomena of spiritualism as the strongest evidence of those beliefs which
were to him more important than life itself, and, this conviction once
established, submission to the strange genius of Swedenborg followed
almost as a matter of course, for by his "science of correspondencies,"
the new phenomena seemed to fall naturally and inevitably into their
proper place in that strange dual scheme of spirit and matter into which
Swedenborg had resolved the Universe. When he had once embarked upon
Occultism, other curious beliefs followed in the train of these main
convictions. He became greatly impressed with the work of a certain Mr.
Melville who believed that he had rediscovered an ancient and long
forgotten method of reading the stars which was in fact the original
mystery of Freemasonry. Frederick took eagerly to this idea which seemed
to fall naturally into place with the Swedenborgian science of
correspondencies, and in 1872 he actually came to England with Mr.
Melville in the hope of being able to convince the Freemasons that all
modern Masonry with its boasted mysteries was futile and meaningless
without the key of Mr. Melville's discovery in which lay the true
explanation of all the masonic signs and symbols. Unfortunately an
interview with the Duke of Leinster, the then Grand Master, gave the two
apostles little satisfaction. It was on this visit that Frederick saw
FitzGerald for the last time, and the latter described him to Mrs. Kemble
as being "quite grand and sincere in this as in all else; with the Faith
of a gigantic child--pathetic and yet humorous to consider and consort
with."
The influence of these ideas gradually coloured Frederick's view on all
current subjects. His years in Florence had been spent in the "hubbub of
imminent war," and he writes indignantly of "the rottenness of these
pitiable petty States and the incredible fantastic tricks of their
abominable rulers." None the less, though he hated and despised most
existing monarchies, he was too much imbued with the romance and dignity
of the past to look with a very favourable eye on revolution. At first he
dismissed Mazzini as "deserving a hempen collar with Nana Sahib and the
King of Delhi," an opinion which the experience of later years compelled
him to reverse. The story of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to him
chaos, but it was the chaos which was to precede the new spiritual
dispensation, and political prejudice never hindered him from the true
appreciation of progress. Thus he writes in 1869:
It is certain that Evil has never been more rampant than during the
last century--witness the great French Revolution, subsequent wars,
minor revolutions, and minor wars throughout the globe, the hundreds
of millions wasted on warlike machinery, the countless numbers of
young men sacrificed to the fiends of ambition and racial jealousy,
society honeycombed with frauds, conspiracies, and class animosities,
etc. etc. On the other hand, never has knowledge of all kinds been
more progressive, never have the Arts and Sciences and Literature been
so rapidly multiplied and so various. Never were charitable
institutions more widely extended or practically beneficent. Never, in
short, were the researches into all kinds of truths, especially those
which concern the relations of man to God and his neighbour, more
earnest, and if this seems to contradict the notorious fact that we
are living at present in a world of Atheism and Materialism--which is
the same thing--it does not really do so, for the two movements,
though separate, are parallel and simultaneous. In short, "The Time of
the End" is a transitional state--which will eventually issue in the
triumph of Good over Evil once and for ever.
France he always hated as the leader of materialism, and he would repeat
with a snort of disgust the remark of M. Bert, who, during the debate in
the Chamber on the secularization of Education, observed that it was
superfluous to exclude what did not exist. The debacle of 1870 seemed a
just if tragic retribution.
"One cannot help, however," he wrote on October 19, 1870, "feeling for
beautiful Paris as one would for a Marie Antoinette passing on her way
to execution. There she is in her solitude and in her beauty. Around
her a circle of iron and fire--within her a restless seething of
tumultuous passions embittering the present--her future a prospect of
burning and famine. Such a downfall is unparalleled in history, and
the agonies of her expiration--if things are carried to their bitter
end--promise to equal those of the terrible siege of Jerusalem."
As might be expected, he tended to Conservatism in politics; Home Rule was
anathema, and Disraeli, endeared to him as the possible leader of a
United Israel, he regarded as a sincerer statesman than Gladstone. None
the less he was able to applaud Gladstone's action on the occasion of the
Bulgarian atrocities, though "even he" seemed to have yielded so much
... to the delicacies and squeamish sensibility, and fluttering nerves
of a lolling generation--an age of sofas and carpets--the rousing of
which even in the justest of causes, the vindication of the rights of
unoffending humanity outraged by savages in comparison with whom
niggers and Red Indians are angels, is not to be attempted without
careful thought--and though a great cry has gone through the land I
fear there will be little wool. There is, however, one
consolation--neither Turkey, nor Egypt, nor any ruffian with a bundle
of dirty clothes upon his head instead of a hat, will ever get another
farthing of _our_ money.
None the less he hated a bigoted Toryism, and thought that "a proper
democratic spirit which aims at a reconstruction of society on the
principle of 'each for all and all for each,' the correlation of
privileges and duties, worth and honour, wealth and charity (in its best
sense), the substitution of altruism for egoism, ought to find its echo in
every loyal heart--and would in fact be the very 'end of Sin, and bringing
in of the Everlasting Righteousness' foretold."
In literature, too, his mind--in spite of an occasional failure to
recognize individual genius--was remarkably alive to the progressive
movements of the day. Indeed, for a man so steeped in classicism, his
freedom from prejudice was remarkable. Browning's poetry, however, in
spite of his affection for the author, he could never appreciate. He wrote
to Mrs. Brotherton:
"What you say of Browning's _Ring and the Book_," he says, soon after
the publication of that work, "I have no doubt is strictly applicable,
however slashing.... I confess, however, that I have never had the
courage to read the book. He is a great friend of mine.... But it
does not follow that I should put up with obsolete horrors, and
unrhythmical composition. What has come upon the world that it should
take any metrical (?) arrangement of facts for holy Poesy? It has been
my weakness to believe that the Fine Arts and Imaginative Literature
should do something more than astonish us by _tours de force_, black
and white contrasts, outrageous inhumanities, or anything criminally
sensational, or merely intellectually potent. As you say a good heart
is better than a clever head, so I say better a page of feeling than a
volume of spasms. Spasms, I fear, is the order of the day. The late
Lord Robertson, a legal celebrity at Edinburgh, pleading on behalf of
some one, said, with his serious face, which was more tickling than
the happiest efforts of Pantaloon: 'We are bound to respect his
feelings as a man and a butcher.' Here the man and the butcher are
bound up in one. Now, in Browning's case, I separate the man from the
butcher. I have nothing to say to him in his blue apron and steel by
his side, but if I meet him in plain clothes I honour him as a
gentleman." And in 1885 he writes: "The Public, it would seem, is
beginning to rouse itself to a perception of the unreliability of the
Browningian school--I have seen several articles on that subject. How
is it that it has never struck his partisans that the probability of
one man being so infinitely superior to his contemporaries as to be
totally unintelligible to them--is infinitely small?
"One thing appears to me certain in Browning, that all his
performances are pure _brain-work_--whatever that may be worth--but as
for the 'divine heat of temperament,' where is it? I can find nothing
but the inextricably hard and the extravagantly fantastical. On such
diet I cannot live."
Nevertheless, it was always the future of Art, not its past, which stirred
his interest, and a letter of his written in 1885, when he was
seventy-eight, shows a youth and vitality of mind truly remarkable in one
whose life had been so cloistered.