given a man of equal Genius he cannot in this complex and analytical
age of Literature embody himself in the metrical and dramatic form if
his purpose is to 'hold up the mirror to Nature, and to give the Time
its form and pressure.' The form of prose fiction is a vastly greater
one, indeed it may be termed all-comprehensive, and admits of the
introduction of lyric or epic verse, in all varieties, as well as the
profoundest analysis of character and motive, and is susceptible of
the highest range of eloquence and unrhythmical poetry, and whatever
it may lose in metrical melody (which, however, is not greatly
regarded in dramatic dialogue) it gains immeasurably in its other
elements. All things considered, I am of opinion that if a man were
endowed with such faculties as Shakespeare's, they would be more
freely and effectively exercised in prose fiction with its wider
capabilities than when 'cribbed, cabined, and confined' in the
trammels of verse."
It may be that the very remoteness of his life was in part the cause of
this lasting freshness and freedom of his mind. He lived so far from the
world as to be almost entirely removed from any bias of self-interest--the
most fruitful source of prejudice. Ambition played no part in his life.
"Once," he wrote in 1888, "I used to have some ambition--that is when
I was a boy at school--I verily believe that at that early age I
exhausted the demoniacal passion which chains you to fixed purposes
like a Prometheus and preys upon you like a Vulture. Though many great
works have been accomplished under the spur of this (so-called) noble
passion, think how much chaotic rubbish has been projected into Space
and Time which ought to have been imprisoned to Eternity--how many
heart-burnings, jealousies, and disappointments--how often the love of
the Beautiful and True is entirely subordinated to that of mere
distinction to be won at any cost. How seldom do we hear writers of
the same school speak well of one another. Especially poisonous are
poets, I think, wherever they apprehend a rival--Honey-suckers like
the Bee, they know how to use their stings even while sipping the
flowers. The unambitious man is at any rate free to use his eyes, to
walk up to and contemplate in the pure clear air and solitude of his
mountain-top the face and form of Nature, and like Turner a-fishing,
see wonderful effects never to be come at by the hosts of those who
get on (or off) by copying one another. I daresay you will disapprove
all this and attribute it to indolent epicurism.
"Latterly since the supernatural and the Future Life, and its
conditions 'such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it
entered into the heart of man to conceive,' have occupied and absorbed
my whole soul to the exclusion of almost every subject which the
Gorillas of this world most delight in, whether scientific, political,
or literary--I have been led to see what men in general consider a
proper use of their stewardship, _i.e._ ruin of body and soul by
inordinate superhuman struggles for supremacy--Samson-like heavings to
upset the neighbour, or supplant him--carbonic acid-breathing
creepings along the dark floors of stifling caverns such as may enable
them to scrape together a preponderance of a certain mineral, etc.
etc.--as the most lamentable examples of Phrenitis--arising simply
from the ineradicable instinct--of Immortality it is true, but
misplaced Immortality--Immortality in this life."
The death of his wife in 1880 was a severe blow to him.
"In answer to your kind letters of sympathy," he wrote to Mr. and Mrs.
Brotherton, "I can say but little. Sorrow such as mine when it falls
upon the aged is virtual paralysis, mental and bodily. I know not what
I may do for the brief period remaining to me in this world. At
present my daughter-in-law attends to household matters, and I still
have the presence of children and grandchildren to remind me that I am
not left entirely desolate. But my chief consolation is that the
beloved of my youth and the friend of my age is already risen, and has
cast off the burthen of her mortal cares and pains, and my only hope
that, God willing, I may follow quickly."
A great but less tremendous shock to him was the death in 1887 of his
sister Emily, once the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. On this occasion he
sent the following lines to his friend:
Farewell, dear sister, thou and I
Will meet no more beneath the sky:
But in the high world where thou art
Mind speaks to Mind, and Heart to Heart,
Not in faint wavering tones, but heard
As twin sweet notes that sound accord.
Thy dwelling in the Angel sphere
Looks forth on a sublimer whole,
Where all that thou dost see and hear
Is in true concord with thy soul--
A great harp of unnumbered strings
Answering to one voice that sings:
Where thousand blisses spring and fade
Swiftly, as in diviner dream,
And inward motions are portrayed
In outward shows that move with them:
After the midnight and dark river
No more to be o'erpast for ever.
Behold the lover of thy youth,
That spirit strong as Love and Truth,
Many a long year gone before,
Awaits thee on the sunny shore:
In that high world of endless wonder
Nor Space, nor Time can hold asunder
Twin souls--as Space and Time have done--
Whom kindest instincts orb in One.
It was inevitable that the later years of one so aged and so solitary
should be more and more filled with the chronicle and anticipation of
death. But he never sank into lethargy, as the following letter, written
in his eighty-first year, shows:
My own sorrow is indeed continually revived by memories continually
reawakened, not only by the comparatively recent occurrence of my own
temporarily final separation from my best friend--but also by that
bird's-eye--so to speak--retrospect, which carries the imagination
over lovely landscapes of the days of youth--out of the golden morning
light of which emerge, in that unaccountable manner which is quite
involuntary, even the most trivial circumstances--moments of no
moment--yet somehow clothed in a more glittering light than the vast
tracts drowned in the general splendour of the dawn, some tiny
pinnacle that reflects the sun, some far off rillet that gushes out
from the wayside.
Even when in his eighty-fourth year his sight began to fail him and the
loss drove him still more back into his inner life, the old eagerness of
mind remained, though finding a melancholy occupation in noting the
changes to which age was daily subjecting his mental and physical
constitution. The note of hope is, however, ineradicable:
An old man of my great age is already dead--old age being the only
Death--and the faculties which I once possessed receive no impulse, as
of old, for activity--no joyous inspiration. The intellect is cold and
frozen like the mountain streams in Winter, a moonless midnight; and
were it not for the increasing illumination of the immortal spirit
which already beholds the dawn of a greater Day beyond the mountains,
I should indeed be desolate, lost! For I am 84 years of age next
June--and in looking back through my long life--it often seems to me
like a dream--many movements, intellectual and physical, seem to me
like impossibilities. When I see my little grandson Charlie skipping
and hear him shouting and singing, and the light-limbed and
light-hearted girls darting like living lightning down the staircase
(which if I were to attempt to imitate I should undoubtedly break my
neck), I say to myself, is it possible that I can ever have been like
them? Alas! for old age. What can be more mournful than a retrospect
of the days of childhood? But a truce to solemn thoughts--the Spring
is come again, the leaves are unfolding, the birds are singing, the
sun is shining, and surely, next to the human countenance, this is the
most lovely emblem, the most beautiful representative material of
inner spiritualities and the resurrection, and ought to have been so
regarded since the dawn of Christianity; for as sure as Winter
blossoms into Summer, the Winter of old age will spring into the
Eternal Life. Fear not, hope all things! What a contrast to these
consoling aspirations is presented in the touching fragment of the old
Greek poet Moschus which no doubt expresses the scepticism of the
ancient world--I give a free translation:
Aye, aye the garden mallows, mint and thyme
When they have wither'd in the winter clime,
After a little space do reappear,
And live again and see another year:
But we, the brave, the noble, and the wise,
When once for all pale Death hath closed our eyes,
Sink into dread oblivion dark and deep,
The everlasting, never-waking sleep.
With the approach of death he seemed to himself to undergo a kind of
physical regeneration.
"Apropos to spiritual matters," he writes in 1890, "I have had
recently for several consecutive days some very strange experiences.
One morning I awoke and seemed to have lost my natural memory. Objects
daily presented to me for years seemed no longer familiar as of
old--but as when a man after years of travel returning to his home and
the chamber he formerly occupied takes some time and labour of thought
to bring back to his recollection the whereabouts of objects once (as
it were) instinctively known to him--I had the same difficulty in
recovering my relations to my own surroundings. And this for days was
supplemented by a strange sense of having been far away and conversant
with wonderful things--movements and tumults--which only immeasurable
distance deadened to my perception like great music borne away by the
wind. Ever and anon there flashed up within me what I can only
describe symbolically as Iridescences of feeling as when the prismatic
colours of a rainbow succeed one another, or the coloured lights in
Pyrotechnics cause objects in midnight darkness to assume their own
hues. But all this, wonderful though it may seem, is not the only
change that has come upon me--I am happy to say that simultaneously
with these phenomena a revolution in my spiritual economy of far
greater moment has, I believe, taken place. I have always prayed for
that regeneration, or second birth ('Thou must be born again,' said
the Lord to Nicodemus), to be shielded from selfhood--and as the
divine answer to such prayers continually repeated, I can declare,
without any self-delusion, that the answer has actually been a
sensible change in the nature of my affections. Never have I felt
towards those around me, such tender inclinations, such earnest desire
to do them all possible good regardless of self-interest, such a
spirit of forgiveness of any wrongs; and my earnest prayerful
thankfulness for such inestimable benefits has been invariably
acknowledged by that Voice from the Lord Himself by which He has
repeatedly ratified to my spiritual ear His promise of blessing and
the continuation thereof--and that 'Thou hast nothing to fear, for I
am with thee night and day, body and soul!' Think of this! But for
God's sake do not attribute these statements of mine, which are
comprehended in a period of many years, to self-delusion or
self-righteousness. God knows, from whom nothing is hid, that I have
never approached Him except in the spirit of profound humility and
self-condemnation, and the answer has always been, 'Thou hast nothing
to fear. I am with thee.'"
As age settled upon him the violence of many of his views abated. His
faith in Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism lost their hold on him and gave
way to a more philosophic condition of mind. His activity, however,
continued unabated. In 1890, after a silence of thirty-six years, he
published his _Isles of Greece_, and the success of the volume encouraged
him to give to the world two others, _Daphne and other Poems_ in 1891, and
_Poems of the Day and Year_ (in which were included some of the verses
contained in the volume of 1854) in 1898. In 1896 he left Jersey to join
his eldest son, Captain Julius Tennyson, in whose house in Kensington he
died on February 26, 1898.
It would be difficult to imagine two persons more strongly contrasted in
life and character than Frederick and Charles. Charles (who was always
Alfred's favourite brother) had nothing of the powerful, erratic,
tempestuous mind of his elder brother. One does not think of him, as
FitzGerald did of Frederick, as a being born for the warmth and glow of
the South, yet in appearance he was (like Alfred) far more Southern than
the eldest brother. So Spanish were his swarthy complexion, brown eyes,
and curly, dark hair, that Thackeray, meeting him in middle age, called
him a "Velasquez _tout craché_." Like Alfred, too, he had a magnificent
deep bass voice; and even in dress the two brothers seem to have
maintained their affinity, for Charles used to wear a soft felt hat and
flowing black cloak much like those which the Millais portrait has
identified with his brother, and these garments, with the addition of
white cuffs, which he wore turned back over his coat sleeves, intensified
the strangely foreign effect of his appearance. But the kinship of the
two brothers extended beyond purely physical resemblance. They remained
inseparable companions till Charles was ordained, and there was hardly a
taste possessed by either which the other did not share. They read,
played, and rambled together; both were extremely fond of dancing (one of
Charles's last Sonnets was "On a County Ball") and were much sought after
as partners at the balls of their countryside. The _Poems by Two
Brothers_, which were almost entirely the work of Alfred and Charles,
while displaying the differing qualities of each, were a joint production,
the fruit of common reading and common enthusiasm. Both the brothers were
regarded by their contemporaries at Cambridge as destined to achieve
poetical greatness. Both possessed the unwearying patience of the
craftsman, the same devotion to science and the same power of close and
loving observation. Charles, however, lacked the fire and energy of
temperament which made Frederick's character remarkable and was to a great
extent shared by Alfred. With all Alfred's sensitiveness and shrinking
from society, he had little of that sympathetic and passionate interest in
the hopes and achievements of their age which drove the younger brother
ever more and more into public life.
[Illustration: CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER.]
Nothing quieter and less eventful than Charles Tennyson's life can well be
imagined. He was ordained in 1835 (three years after taking his degree)
and immediately obtained a Curacy at Tealby. In the same year he became
Vicar of Grasby, a small village in the Lincolnshire wolds between Caistor
and Brigg.
In the following year he married Louisa Sellwood, whose sister was to
become Alfred's wife, and from that time until just before his death on
April 25, 1879, his life, save for an occasional holiday and too frequent
lapses from health, knew little variation. Like all the Tennysons, Charles
was of a nervous temperament, and this condition often induced acute
suffering. So severe indeed was his struggle with this disorder and the
still more perilous condition which resulted from it that at one time,
soon after his marriage, he was compelled to leave his parish for some
months in search of strength. Throughout these trying interludes the
devotion of his wife, a woman of great humour and power of mind and
character, was of the utmost service to him. Indeed, his debt to her was
great at all times of his life. She would often act almost as a curate to
him in the straggling parish, tirelessly visiting and nursing the sick (a
duty which they both unflinchingly observed even in the epidemics of
small-pox which were then frequent), keeping all his accounts, both
personal and parochial, and even sometimes writing his sermons. The
devotion of the pair was remarkable, retaining a certain youthful ardour
to the end, and when Charles died his wife was carried to the grave within
a month.
As early as 1830, Charles had published a small volume of sonnets, which
(as is well known) earned the hearty commendation of Coleridge and Leigh
Hunt. As in the case of Frederick, however, there followed a prolonged
silence, the next volume not making its appearance till 1864; others
followed in 1868 and 1873, and all were collected and republished, with a
sage, benevolent, and affectionate Introduction by his friend James
Spedding, in 1880. The reason for this long silence was a slightly
different one from that which was responsible for Frederick's
intermission. In both cases, no doubt, the feeling that it would be
impertinent for another person of the name of Tennyson to put his work
before the public had some influence. In Charles's case, however, there
were further considerations. The violent shock which his health sustained
by that prolonged early illness and his subsequent troubles to some extent
numbed his powers. "The edge of thought was blunted by the stress of the
hard world," and the same cause probably increased his natural modesty
till it became almost morbid. He was perpetually haunted by the fear that
his poetry was not original, and the only word of satisfaction which
Spedding ever heard him use of any of his sonnets was with regard to one
which owed its origin to a period of deep affliction, of which the poet
said that he thought it was good because he _knew_ it to be true. Whatever
the cause, however, during these thirty-four years Charles Turner
published nothing and, indeed, hardly even wrote anything. Spedding, in
his Introduction, has collected a few fragments which were gathered from
the poet's notebooks, and show that his mind still occasionally noted a
stray simile or description, doubtless intended to be subsequently worked
up into a poem. A few of these are in his happiest manner. One may quote
the following picture of goldfish in a glass bowl:
As though King Midas did the surface touch,
Constraining the clear water to their change
With shooting motions and quick trails of light.
Now a rich girth and then a narrow gleam,
And now a shaft and now a sheet of gold.
and the lines on the opening of the tomb of Charlemagne:
They rove the marble where the ancient King,
Like one forspent with sacred study sate,
Robed like a King, but as a scholar pale.
His mind, too, was always working in the same direction on his rambles
about the countryside, and he would sometimes, when walking with Agnes
Weld, "the little, ambling, stile-clearing niece," who was often his
guest, hit on some phrase which took his fancy and was imparted to his
companion, who remembers his description of the slanting light-bars on a
cloudy day as "the oars of the golden Galley of the sun," and many another
phrase as happy as any of the homely and perfect touches in his published
works.
But though these years were barren of actual output, they were of value in
many ways, and not the least as a period of incubation, for many a phrase
or idea first formed in them was subsequently perfected and published. The
intermission, too, left him freer to study and to labour among his
parishioners. At the beginning and end of his life, poetry occupied a
great deal of his time, for each of his sonnets, in spite of their
apparent facility, was the result of much toil. He would work at the same
lines morning after morning, and read the results aloud to his wife, or
niece, or other companion after dinner, the same poem going through a
great succession of forms. A letter to Miss Weld, in answer to some
suggestion of a subject connected with the then recent excavations at
Mycenae, shows his method of work and something of the manifold interests
of his secluded life:
"I never can undertake to work to order," he writes, "though the order
comes from the dearest of customers. If I get a good hold of that
poor, noble, nodding head I will put him on board of a respectable
sonnet and try to save his memory from drowning.... Mycenae is a very
exciting subject, but I have Kelsey Moor Chapel to write on--a
commission from Mrs. Townsend ... and a poor dead dog haunts me" (see
Sonnet 97--Collected Edition).
During these barren years Charles Turner's devotion to his parochial work
was intense. Grasby was a somewhat barbarous village when he obtained the
living. Belief in witchcraft was still rife, and one of the popular charms
against its influence was to cut a sheep in half, put the body on a
scarlet cloth, and walk between the pieces. Such religion as there was
among the poor was of a rather harsh spirit, as may be seen from an
anecdote preserved by Miss Weld of an old cottager, who, hearing Mrs.
Turner mention the name of Hobbes, exclaimed to his wife: "Why, loovey,
that's the graate Hobbes that's in hell!" The climate, too, was as harsh
as the character of the people, for the village stands high and bleak.
Friends remember Louisa Turner going about her ministrations in clogs, and
during one particularly sharp winter she writes: "I am in a castle now of
double cotton wool petticoat and thick baize drawers and waistcoat." The
Turners soon found it necessary to leave the house at Caistor, three miles
off, where Sam Turner, Charles's uncle, the preceding vicar, had lived,
for the distance made any real intimacy with the people impossible.
Charles had inherited a small property from his uncle (the event was the
occasion of his change of name), and this made it possible for him to
build a new vicarage and to further enrich the village with new schools
and a new church. He also took the very practical step of buying the
village inn and putting it in charge of a reliable servant, a scheme
which, for a time at least, had excellent effects on the temperance of the
inhabitants.
There were no children of the marriage, but the pair adopted the children
of the whole village, opening their house and grounds to them for
Christmas trees and summer festivities. Children and animals were always
devoted to Charles Turner, as he to them. He was, as the villagers said,
"Strangen gone upon birds and things." He never shot after that tragedy of
the swallow which he never forgot (see Sonnet 200), and birds of every
kind flocked to him daily as he fed them on his lawn. Flowers and trees,
too, he loved almost as keenly as he did children. He quarrelled seriously
with one of his curates whom he found exorcising the flowers, which were
to be used for church decoration, by means of the service contained in the
Directorium Anglicanum, maintaining stoutly that if any spirits dwelt in
flowers they must be angels and not devils. His garden was a jungle of
old-fashioned flowers, golden-rod, sweet-william, convolvulus, and rose of
Sharon; figs and apricots ripened on his walls, and the house was covered
with roses, honeysuckle, white clematis, and blue ceanothus. The grounds,
too, boasted some fine timber, which Charles never would allow to be
pruned or cut, even permitting the willow-props to outgrow and destroy the
rose trees (Sonnet 270), and once, when it was proposed to fell some large
trees within sight of his house, he threatened to throw up his living and
leave Grasby.
In this peaceful world Charles found plenty to occupy his time. He saw
little of society except when Alfred or Frederick, or one of his old
college friends, came to visit him, and the resources of the neighbourhood
were strained to the utmost to afford them entertainment. He found,
however, a congenial companion in Mr. Townsend, a neighbouring clergyman
of wide culture much interested in science. And the care of his parish
occupied the greater part of his time. Theology, too, was a favourite
study with him. He began life as an Evangelical, but in later years tended
(partly under the influence of his wife, who would often, on the vigil of
a saint, spend half the night on her knees) more and more towards the High
Church.