Abstraction. I have seen that in a human face." (I, E. F. G., have seen it
in _his_. Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose it may
be so with all _Poets_.)
1850
"When I was sitting by the banks of Doon--I don't know why--I wasn't in
the least spoony--not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the
Ages)--when all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears."
"I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins who stood
by said there was no one in the two parishes who could do it. I was then
about twenty-five." (He could carry his mother's pony round the
dinner-table.--E. F. G.)
"The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land's
End." (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)
"Thackeray is the better artist, Dickens the [more affluent] Genius. He,
like Hogarth, has the moral sublime sometimes: but not the ideal sublime.
Perhaps I seem talking nonsense; I mean Hogarth could not conceive an
Apollo or a Jupiter." (Or Sigismunda.--E. F. G.)--"I think Hogarth greater
than Dickens."
(Looking at an engraving of the Sistine Madonna in which only She and the
Child, I think, were represented.)
"Perhaps finer than the whole composition in so far as one's eyes are more
concentrated on the subject. The Child seems to me the furthest result of
human art. His attitude is that of a man--his countenance a
Jupiter's--perhaps rather too much so."
(He afterwards said (1852) that his own little boy, Hallam, explained the
expression of Raffaelle's. He said he thought he had known Raffaelle
before he went to Italy--but not Michael Angelo--not only Statues and
Frescoes, but some picture (I think) of a Madonna "dragging a ton of a
Child over her Shoulder.")
Seaford: December 27th-28th, 1852
"Babies delight in being moved to and from anything: that is amusement to
them. What a Life of Wonder--every object new. This morning he (his own
little boy) worshipp'd the Bed-post when a gleam of sunshine lighted on
it."
"I am afraid of him. It is a Man. Babes have an expression of grandeur
that children lose. I used to think that the old Painters overdid the
Expression and Dignity of their infant Christs: but I see they did not."
"I was struck at the Duke's (Wellington's) Funeral with the look of sober
Manhood and Humanity in the British Soldiers."
(Of Laurence's chalk drawing of ----'s head--"rather diplomatic than
inhuman"--he said in fun.--E. F. G.)
Brighton, 1852-1853
"The finest Sea I have seen is at Valentia (Ireland), without any wind and
seemingly without a Wave, but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind it,
it dashes up into foam--blue diamond it looked like--all along the
rocks--like ghosts playing at Hide and Seek."
(At some other time on the same subject.)
"When I was in Cornwall it had blown a storm of wind and rain for
days--all of a sudden fell into perfect calm; I was a little inland of the
cliffs, when, after a space of perfect silence, a long roll of
Thunder--from some wave rushing into a cavern, I suppose--came up from the
Distance and died away. I never _felt_ Silence like that."
"_This_" (looking from Brighton Pier) "is not a grand sea: only an angry
curt sea. It seems to _shriek_ as it recoils with its pebbles along the
beach."
"The Earth has light of her own--so has Venus--perhaps all the other
Planets--electrical light, or what we call Aurora. The light edge of the
dark hemisphere of the moon--the 'old Moon in the new Moon's arms.'"
"Nay, they say she has no atmosphere at all."
(I do not remember when this was said, nor whether I have exactly set it
down; therefore must not make A. T. answerable for what he did not say, or
for what after-discovery may have caused him to unsay. He had a powerful
brain for Physics as for the Ideal. I remember his noticing that the
forward-bending horns of some built-up mammal in the British Museum would
never force its way through jungle, etc., and I observed on an after-visit
that they had been altered accordingly.)
"Sometimes I think Shakespeare's Sonnets finer than his Plays--which is of
course absurd. For it is the knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets
so fine."
"Do you think the Artist ever feels satisfied with his Song? Not with the
Whole, I think; but perhaps the expression of parts."
(Standing one day with him looking at two busts--one of Dante, the other
of Goethe, in a London shop, I asked, "What is wanting to make Goethe's
as fine as the other's?")
"The Divine." ("Edel sei der Mensch" was a poem in which he thought he
found "The Divine."--ED.)
(Taking up and reading some number of _Pendennis_ at my lodging.) "It's
delicious--it's so mature."
(Of Richardson's _Clarissa_, etc.) "I love those great, still Books."
"What is it in Dryden? I always feel that he is greater than his works."
(Though he thought much of "Theodore and Honoria," and quoted
emphatically:
More than a mile _immerst_ within the wood.)
"Two of the finest similes in poetry are Milton's--that of the Fleet
hanging in the air (_Paradise Lost_), and the gunpowder-like 'So started
up in his foul shape the Fiend.' (Which latter A. T. used to enact with
grim humour, from the crouching of the Toad to the Explosion.) Say what
you please, I feel certain that Milton after Death shot up into some grim
Archangel." _N.B._--He used in earlier days to do the sun coming out from
a cloud, and returning into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting
of eyes and lips, etc. And, with a great fluffing up of his hair into full
wig, and elevation of cravat and collar, George the Fourth in as comical
and wonderful a way.
"I could not read through _Palmerin of England_, nor _Amadis of Gaul_, or
any of those old romances--not even 'Morte d'Arthur,' though with so many
fine things in it--But all strung together without Art."
Old Hallam had been speaking of Shakespeare as the greatest of men, etc.
A. T. "Well, he was the Man one would have wished to introduce to another
Planet as a sample of our kind."
_Àpropos_ of physical stature, A. T. had been noticing how small Guizot
looked beside old Hallam (when he went with Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay
over the Houses of Parliament.--ED.).
"I was skating one day at full swing and came clash against a man of my
own stature who was going at the same. We both fell asunder--got up--and
_laughed_. Had we been short men we might have resented."
(I blamed some one for swearing at the servant girl in a lodging.) "I
don't know if women don't like it from men: they think it shows Vigour."
(Not that he ever did so himself.)
"There is a want of central dignity about him--he excuses himself, etc."
"Most great men write terse hands."
"I like those old Variorum Classics--all the Notes make the Text look
precious."
(Of some dogmatic summary.) "That is the quick decision of a mind that
sees half the truth."
TENNYSON AND THACKERAY
By LADY RITCHIE
... You ask me what I can remember of your Father and of mine in early
days. I seem to _know_ more than I actually remember....
In looking over old letters and papers, I have found very few mentions of
the many actual meetings between them, though again and again the Poet's
name is quoted and recorded, nor can I recall the time when I did not hear
it spoken of with trust and admiring regard. To this day we possess "The
Day Dream," copied out from beginning to end in my Father's writing.
He was about twenty years of age when one day, in May 1832, he wrote down
in his diary:
Kemble and Hallam sat here for an hour. Read an article in _Blackwood_
about A. Tennyson, abusing Hallam for his essay in _The Englishman_.
Then again ...
Kemble read me some very beautiful verses of Tennyson's.
And again:
Found that B. and I did not at all agree about Tennyson. B. is a
clever fellow nevertheless, and makes money by magazine writing, in
which I should much desire to follow his example.
After my Father's marriage, when he was living in Coram Street, Tennyson
and FitzGerald both came to see him there. In an old letter of my mother's
she describes Mr. Tennyson coming and my sitting at the table beside her
in a tall chair and with a new pinafore for the occasion. FitzGerald, I
think, also spoke of one of these meetings, and of my Father exclaiming
suddenly, "My dear Alfred, you do talk d---- well."
As we grew up, the Tennyson books were a part of our household life. I can
especially remember one volume, which came out when I was a little girl
and which my Father lent to a friend, and I also remember his laughing
vexation and annoyance when she returned the book all scored and defaced
with absurd notes and marks of exclamation everywhere.
I once published an article in an American magazine from which I venture
to quote a passage which tells of one of the early meetings:
I can remember vaguely, on one occasion through a cloud of smoke,
looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet
Laureate. He was sitting with my Father in the twilight after some
family meal in the old house in Kensington; it was Tennyson himself
who afterwards reminded me how upon this occasion, while my Father was
speaking, my little sister looked up suddenly from the book over which
she had been absorbed, saying, in her sweet childish voice, "Papa, why
do you not write books like _Nicholas Nickleby_?" Then again, I seem
to hear across that same familiar table, voices, without shape or
name, talking and telling each other that Mr. Tennyson was married,
that he and his wife had been met walking on the terrace at Clevedon
Court, and then the clouds descend again, except, indeed, that I can
still see my Father riding off on his brown cob to Mr. and Mrs.
Tennyson's house at Twickenham to attend the christening of Hallam
their eldest son.
* * * * *
Being _themselves_, when men, such as these two men, appreciate each
other's work, they know, with their great instinct for truth and
directness, what to admire--smaller people are apt to admire the men
rather than the work. When Tennyson and my Father met, it was as when
knights meet in the field.
How my Father appreciated the _Idylls_ will be seen from the following
letter, which came as an answer to his own:[25]
FARRINGFORD, I.W.
MY DEAR THACKERAY--Should I not have answered you ere this 6th of
November! surely; what excuse--none that I know of; except indeed that
perhaps your very generosity--boundlessness of approval--made me in a
measure shamefaced. I could scarcely accept it, being, I fancy, a
modest man and always more or less doubtful of my own efforts in any
line; but I may tell you that your little note gave me more pleasure
than all the journals and monthlies and quarterlies which have come
across me, not so much from being the Great Novelist, I hope, as from
your being my good old friend--or perhaps of your being both of these
in one. Well--let it be. I have been ransacking all sorts of old
albums and scrap-books, but cannot find anything worthy sending you.
Unfortunately, before your letter arrived, I had agreed to give
Macmillan the only available poem I had by me. I don't think he would
have got it (for I dislike publishing in magazines), except that he
had come to visit me in my island, and was sitting and blowing his
weed _vis-à-vis_....
Whenever you feel your brains as "the remainder biscuit," or indeed
whenever you will, come over to me and take a blow on these downs
where the air, as Keats said, "is worth sixpence a pint," and bring
your girls too.--Yours always,
A. TENNYSON.
* * * * *
I can remember all my Father's pleasure when Alfred Tennyson gave him
"Tithonus" for one of the early numbers of the _Cornhill Magazine_.
He was once at Farringford, but this was before the time of the
_Cornhill_.
From America, where people store their kindly records and from whence so
many echoes of the past are apt to reach us again,--some in worthy, and
some, I fear, in less worthy voices,--I have received from time to time,
the gift of an hour from the past, vivid and unalloyed. One day in the
_Century_ magazine, I came upon a page which retold for me the whole story
of a happy hour and of my Father's affectionate regard for that chivalrous
American, Bayard Taylor, who came to see him, and for whom he had wished
to do his best, by sending him to Farringford. All this came back to me
when Alfred Tennyson's letter was reproduced in the _Century_, his
charming answer to my Father, and my Father's own note in the margin....
Bayard Taylor himself has put the date to it all--June 1857.
My Father writes to Bayard Taylor:
MY DEAR B. T.--I was so busy yesterday that I could not keep my
agreeable appointment with Thompson, and am glad I didn't fetch you to
Greenwich. Here's a note which concerns you and I am ever yours,
W. M. T.
* * * * *
The letter from Lord Tennyson runs as follows:
FARRINGFORD, I.W.
MY DEAR THACKERAY--Your American friend and poet-traveller has never
arrived; he has, I suppose, changed his mind. I am sure I should have
been very glad to see him, for my castle was never yet barricaded and
entrenched against good fellows. I write now, this time to say that
after the 30th I shall not be here.
My best remembrances to your daughters, whom I have twice seen, once
as little girls, and again a year or so back.--Yours ever,
A. TENNYSON.
* * * * *
Afterwards Bayard Taylor found his way to Farringford, and he has written
a happy account of the visit.[26]
* * * * *
I hardly know whether or not to give the record of a meeting which I
myself remember. Once after a long visit to Freshwater I returned home to
Palace Green, and hearing that Alfred Tennyson had come up soon after to
stay for a few days at Little Holland House close by, I told my Father,
and together we planned a visit, to which I eagerly looked forward, with
much pride and youthful excitement. It was not far to walk, the high road
leads straight to Holland House, in the grounds of which Little Holland
House then stood among the trees. Mr. and Mrs. Prinsep were living there
and Mr. Watts. When we reached the House and were let in, we saw Mr. Watts
in his studio; he seemed to hesitate to admit us; then came the ladies.
Mr. Tennyson was upstairs, we were told, not well. He had hurt his shin.
"He did not wish for visitors, nevertheless certainly we were to go up,"
they said, and we mounted into a side wing by some narrow staircase and
came to a door, by which cans of water were standing in a row. As we
entered, a man-servant came out of the little room.
Tennyson was sitting in a chair with his leg up, evidently ill and out of
spirits.
"I am sorry to find you laid up," said my Father.
"They insisted upon my seeing the doctor for my leg," said Alfred, "and he
prescribed cold water dressing."
"Yes," said my Father, "there's nothing like it, I have tried it myself."
And then no more! No high conversation--no quotations--no recollections.
After a minute or two of silence we came away. My tall Father tramped down
the little wooden staircase followed by a bitterly disappointed audience.
* * * * *
When I was writing that same magazine article from which I have already
given an extract, I asked Edward FitzGerald if he could help me, and if I
might quote anything from his letters and from _Euphranor_:
"MY DEAR ANNE RITCHIE"--Mr. FitzGerald wrote--"Your letter found me at
Aldburgh on our coast where I come to hear my old sea talk to me, as
more than sixty years ago, and to get a blow out on his back. Pray
quote anything you please, provided with Alfred's permission and no
compliments to the author.
"I do not think my _fanfaron_ about him would be of any such service
as you suppose; strangers usually take all that as the flourish of a
friendly adviser, and would rather have some facts, such as that
perhaps of his words about the Raphael and the little Hallam's worship
of the bed-post.[27] I suppose it was in 1852 at Seaford near
Brighton. I can swear absolutely and can now hear and see him as he
said it; so don't let him pretend to gainsay or modify that, whether
he may choose to have it quoted or not.
"Ah, I have often thought that I might have done some good service if
I had kept to him and followed him and noted the fine true things
which fell from his lips on every subject, practical or aesthetic, as
they call it.
"Bayard Taylor, in some essays lately published, quotes your Father
saying that Tennyson was the wisest man he knew--which, by the way,
would tell more in America than all I could write or say.
"Your finding it hard to make an article about A. T. will excuse my
inability to help you, as you asked. I did not know (as in the case of
your Father also) where to begin or how to go on without a
beginning.--Ever yours,
E. F. G."
In 1863, just after our Father's death, my sister and I came to
Freshwater. It seemed to us that perhaps there more than anywhere else we
might find some gleam of the light of our home, with the friend who had
known him and belonged to his life and whom he trusted.
We arrived late in the afternoon. It was bitter weather, the snow lying
upon the ground. Mrs. Cameron had lent us a cottage, and the fires were
already burning, and as we rested aimlessly in the twilight, we seemed
aware of a tall figure standing in the window, wrapped in a heavy cloak,
with a broad-brimmed hat. This was Tennyson, who had walked down to see us
in silent sympathy.
TENNYSON ON HIS FRIENDS OF LATER LIFE
TO W. C. MACREADY
1851
Farewell, Macready, since to-night we part;
Full-handed thunders often have confessed
Thy power, well-used to move the public breast.
We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.
Farewell, Macready, since this night we part,
Go, take thine honours home; rank with the best,
Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest
Who made a nation purer through their art.
Thine is it that our drama did not die,
Nor flicker down to brainless pantomime,
And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see.
Farewell, Macready; moral, grave, sublime;
Our Shakespeare's bland and universal eye
Dwells pleased, through twice a hundred years, on thee.
TO THE REV. F. D. MAURICE
Come, when no graver cares employ,
Godfather, come and see your boy:
Your presence will be sun in winter,
Making the little one leap for joy.
For, being of that honest few,
Who give the Fiend himself his due,
Should eighty-thousand college-councils
Thunder "Anathema," friend, at you;
Should all our churchmen foam in spite
At you, so careful of the right,
Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight;
Where, far from noise and smoke of town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All round a careless-order'd garden
Close to the ridge of a noble down.
You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine:
For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary Channel
Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand;
Where, if below the milky steep
Some ship of battle slowly creep,
And on thro' zones of light and shadow
Glimmer away to the lonely deep,
We might discuss the Northern sin
Which made a selfish war begin;
Dispute the claims, arrange the chances;
Emperor, Ottoman, which shall win:
Or whether war's avenging rod
Shall lash all Europe into blood;
Till you should turn to dearer matters,
Dear to the man that is dear to God;
How best to help the slender store,
How mend the dwellings, of the poor;
How gain in life, as life advances,
Valour and charity more and more.
Come, Maurice, come: the lawn as yet
Is hoar with rime, or spongy-wet;
But when the wreath of March has blossom'd,
Crocus, anemone, violet,
Or later, pay one visit here,
For those are few we hold as dear;
Nor pay but one, but come for many,
Many and many a happy year.
_January, 1854._
TO SIR JOHN SIMEON
IN THE GARDEN AT SWAINSTON
Nightingales warbled without,
Within was weeping for thee:
Shadows of three dead men
Walk'd in the walks with me,
Shadows of three dead men[28] and thou wast one of the three.
Nightingales sang in his woods:
The Master was far away:
Nightingales warbled and sang
Of a passion that lasts but a day;
Still in the house in his coffin the Prince of courtesy lay.
Two dead men have I known
In courtesy like to thee:
Two dead men have I loved
With a love that ever will be:
Three dead men have I loved and thou art last of the three.
TO EDWARD LEAR, ON HIS TRAVELS IN GREECE
Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneïan pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,
Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there:
And trust me while I turn'd the page,
And track'd you still on classic ground,
I grew in gladness till I found
My spirits in the golden age.
For me the torrent ever pour'd
And glisten'd--here and there alone
The broad-limb'd Gods at random thrown
By fountain-urns;--and Naiads oar'd
A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars; on the swell
The silver lily heaved and fell;
And many a slope was rich in bloom
From him that on the mountain lea
By dancing rivulets fed his flocks
To him who sat upon the rocks,
And fluted to the morning sea.
TO THE MASTER OF BALLIOL
(PROFESSOR JOWETT)
I
Dear Master in our classic town,
You, loved by all the younger gown
There at Balliol,
Lay your Plato for one minute down,
II
And read a Grecian tale re-told,[29]
Which, cast in later Grecian mould,
Quintus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old;
III
And on this white midwinter day--
For have the far-off hymns of May,
All her melodies,
All her harmonies echo'd away?--
IV
To-day, before you turn again
To thoughts that lift the soul of men,
Hear my cataract's
Downward thunder in hollow and glen,
V
Till, led by dream and vague desire,
The woman, gliding toward the pyre,
Find her warrior
Stark and dark in his funeral fire.
TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL
O Patriot Statesman, be thou wise to know
The limits of resistance, and the bounds
Determining concession; still be bold
Not only to slight praise but suffer scorn;
And be thy heart a fortress to maintain
The day against the moment, and the year
Against the day; thy voice, a music heard
Thro' all the yells and counter-yells of feud
And faction, and thy will, a power to make
This ever-changing world of circumstance,
In changing, chime with never-changing Law.
[Illustration: THE DRIVE AT FARRINGFORD, SHOWING ON THE LEFT THE
"WELLINGTONIA" PLANTED BY GARIBALDI. From a drawing by W. Biscombe
Gardner.]
TO GIFFORD PALGRAVE[30]
I
Ulysses, much-experienced man,
Whose eyes have known this globe of ours,
Her tribes of men, and trees, and flowers,
From Corrientes to Japan,
II
To you that bask below the Line,
I soaking here in winter wet--
The century's three strong eights[31] have met
To drag me down to seventy-nine
III
In summer if I reach my day--
To you, yet young, who breathe the balm
Of summer-winters by the palm
And orange grove of Paraguay,
IV
I tolerant of the colder time,
Who love the winter woods, to trace
On paler heavens the branching grace
Of leafless elm, or naked lime,
V
And see my cedar green, and there
My giant ilex keeping leaf
When frost is keen and days are brief--
Or marvel how in English air
VI
My yucca, which no winter quells,
Altho' the months have scarce begun,
Has push'd toward our faintest sun
A spike of half-accomplish'd bells--
VII
Or watch the waving pine which here
The warrior of Caprera set,[32]
A name that earth will not forget
Till earth has roll'd her latest year--
VIII
I, once half-crazed for larger light
On broader zones beyond the foam,
But chaining fancy now at home
Among the quarried downs of Wight,
IX
Not less would yield full thanks to you
For your rich gift, your tale of lands
I know not,[33] your Arabian sands;
Your cane, your palm, tree-fern, bamboo,
X
The wealth of tropic bower and brake;
Your Oriental Eden-isles,[34]
Where man, nor only Nature smiles;
Your wonder of the boiling lake;[35]
XI
Phra-Chai, the Shadow of the Best,[36]
Phra-bat[37] the step; your Pontic coast;
Crag-cloister;[38] Anatolian Ghost;[39]
Hong-Kong,[40] Karnac,[41] and all the rest.
XII
Thro' which I follow'd line by line
Your leading hand, and came, my friend,
To prize your various book, and send
A gift of slenderer value, mine.
TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA
I
At times our Britain cannot rest,
At times her steps are swift and rash;
She moving, at her girdle clash
The golden keys of East and West.
II