last Act of the "Promise of May." "Well, isn't that tragic?" he naïvely
asked at one point, I think where Eva falls down dead.
Next morning, I had to leave quite early for London. He just appeared at
the top of the stairs, and offered to come down to say good-bye, but I
would not let him. "I can remember little more of this delightful visit,"
so I wrote at the time. "He was full, as usual, of the public lies, and
the necessity of England being strong at sea."
I did not see him again till after my second marriage, which took place on
August 9, 1888. We paid a flying visit to Lambert's Hotel, Freshwater, in
April 1889. Of this I have made only the scantiest record. Something led
us to speak of the famous line in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_:
[Greek: ommatôn en achêniais.]
"So modern," he remarked. He also spoke of the pathos of Euripides, and of
the grandeur of the "Passing of Oedipus" in the _Oedipus Coloneus_, and
_Theseus_
[Greek: cheir' antechonta kratos.]
He referred again to lack of sympathy in his time between dons and
undergraduates. This seemed to be a memory often present to his mind.
Our next visit was in March 1890, when, with my wife's sister, we stayed
at Lambert's Hotel. On Friday, March 28, we went to tea at Farringford,
and found him in his little sun-trap of a summer-house, the evening sun
playing full upon us, and bringing into perfect beauty the green lawn,
the spreading trees, and the clumps of daffodils. He began by speaking of
himself as depressed, but soon smiled away all such symptoms, and made us
laugh with a story of the Duke of Wellington, when some prosy personage
addressed him with a flattering compliment. He always seemed to enjoy
anecdotes of the Great Duke. He was wearing a red cap which, in the
sunlight, became him well; but he said playfully that Lady Tennyson
disliked it as too suggestive of a "bonnet rouge." Something, I forget
what, led to a reference to the well-known verse:
Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
He once asked a rather gushing lady what sort of birds she supposed these
to be. "Nightingales," was the rather sentimental answer. "Who ever heard
a nightingale say 'Maud'?" was the somewhat stern reply. "They were rooks
of course."
My wife mentioned that she and her sister had been reading the "Idylls" of
late. "Do you mean _my_ Idylls," he said; "I am glad you don't call them
Idylls." We soon got talking of his recently published "Crossing the Bar."
When asked what was the precise grammatical reference in the third line of
the verse:
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
_When that which drew from out the boundless deep_
Turns again home,
he answered rather emphatically, "I meant _both_ human life[61] _and_ the
water." He went on, "They say I write so slowly. Well, that poem came to
me in five minutes. Anyhow, under ten minutes." Afterwards, when I had
some quiet talk with Lady Tennyson, she confirmed what he had implied as
to the rapidity with which he usually composed.
At this point I shall do well to insert extracts from my dear wife's
journal, describing a few incidents in what proved our last visit to
Farringford. It was at the end of January 1892, when the Poet, born on
August 6,[62] 1809, was well on in his eighty-third year. She writes as
follows:
VISIT TO FARRINGFORD, JANUARY 1892
By Mrs. MONTAGU BUTLER
On January 26 Montagu and I left our two small boys at Eton Villa,
Shanklin, to spend the night at Lambert's Hotel, Freshwater. After
leaving our traps at the hotel we walked up to Farringford in time for
two o'clock lunch. I sat next the Poet at table, and had some talk
with him. He spoke of the metres of Horace, and said that he always
thought his Sapphics uninteresting and monotonous. "What a relief it
is," he said, "when he _does_ allow himself some irregularity, for
instance:
Laurea donandus Apollinari."
On the other hand, he admired his Alcaics immensely. The discovery for
which he always hoped the most was of some further writings of Sappho
herself. He considered the metre beautiful under her treatment.
Then we spoke of Schliemann, of whom I had just been reading in
Schuchardt's book, and he said he had no faith in him. "How could a
great city have been built on a little ridge like that (meaning
Hissarlik)? Where would have been the room for Priam's fifty sons and
fifty daughters?"
He also thought the supposed identifications of topography absurd, and
preferred to believe that Homer's descriptions were entirely
imaginary. When I said that I thought that a disappointing view, he
called me "a wretched localizer." "They try to localize me too," he
said. "There is one man wants to make out that I describe nothing I
have not seen." Also, with some irritation, of other accounts of
himself: "Full of lies, and ---- made me tell a big one at the end."
Next day we walked up at about 12.20 to accompany him in his morning
walk. Montagu and he were in front, Hallam Tennyson and I behind.
Montagu tells me how he was indignant with Z. for charging him with
general plagiarism, in particular about Lactantius and other classics,
"of whom," he said, "I haven't read a word." Also, of taking from
Sophocles, "whom I never read since I was a young man"; and of owing
his "moanings of the sea" to Horace's _gementis litora Bospori_. Some
one charged him with having stolen the "In Memoriam" metre from some
very old poet of whom he had never heard. He said, in answer to
Montagu's question, that the metres of both "Maurice" and "The Daisy"
were original. He had never written in the metre of Gray's _Elegy_,
except epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. He admired the metre much, and
thought the poem immortal[63].
Hartley Coleridge, he said, spoke of Pindar as the "Newmarket Poet."
He thought the loss of his Dithyrambs most serious, judging from the
remaining fragment. He had from early boyhood been familiar with the
fact that Wolsey and Cromwell in _Henry VIII._ were by Fletcher, but
he felt absolutely certain that the description of the Field of the
Cloth of Gold was by Shakespeare's own hand. He quoted it, as well as
several lines from Wolsey. When I said how glad I was he had written
about the Duke of Clarence, he said, "Yes, but I wouldn't write an
Installation Ode for the Chancellor."
So far Montagu reported. After this we others came up, and the old
Poet and I walked home together.
We spoke a little of our projected tour to Greece. He had never been
there, but would have greatly liked to go--in a private yacht--"but
they tell me an old man is safest at home, and I dare say it is true;
and I couldn't stand the vermin!" I told him I was hoping to study
classical architecture a little before going out, and he said that he
thought, after all, Gothic architecture was finer than classic. "It is
like blank verse," he said; "it will suit the humblest cottage and the
grandest cathedral. It has more mystery than the classic." He thought
many of our cathedrals spoiled by their vile glass. He had been
disappointed, in his late visit to Cambridge, to notice that the
windows in King's seemed to be losing their brilliancy and to look
dark.
After we had been walking a few minutes in silence, he said to me, "Do
you see what the beauty is in the line,
That all the Thrones are clouded by your loss?"--
quoting from his still unpublished poem on the young Prince. I said I
thought it very beautiful; but he asked if I saw why he had used the
word _clouded_ instead of _darkened_ or another. "It makes you think
of a great mountain," he explained. Then he spoke of the great
richness of the English language due to its double origin, the Norman
and Saxon words. How hard it would be for a foreigner to feel the
difference in the line
An _infant_ crying for the light,
had the word _baby_ been substituted, which would at once have made it
ridiculous. He told me that his lines "came to" him; he did not make
them up, but that, when they had come, he wrote them down, and looked
into them to see what they were like. This was very interesting,
especially as he had told Montagu, at Easter, 1890, that he had
composed "Crossing the Bar" in less than ten minutes.
Then he said again, what I have heard him say before, that though a
poet is _born_, he will not be much of a poet if he is not _made_ too.
Then he asked me if I was fond of Pindar. I am very glad that he
admires him greatly. He could not believe Paley's theory that Pindar
is earlier than Homer. I vented my dislike of Paley's horribly prosaic
translations in his notes on Aeschylus, and he said _he_ had always
used Blomfield, he found his Glossary such a help.
We were now indoors, and in a few minutes went in to luncheon. I was
again seated next him, and we had some more talk. He got upon the
subject of College life, and told me anecdotes of himself and his
friends, one very amusing one about Tom Taylor. During some vacation
Tom Taylor's rooms were lent by the College authorities to a farmer, a
member of an Agricultural Society which they were entertaining. Taylor
knew this perfectly well; but in the middle of the night suddenly
entered the room, in a long traveller's cloak and with a lantern in
his hand, "Pray, what are you doing in my room, sir, and in my bed?"
feigning great surprise and indignation. The poor old farmer tried to
explain that he was honoured by being the guest of the College, but
Taylor refused to be pacified; when suddenly, in the midst of their
altercation, enter Charles Spring Rice, brother of Stephen,
personating the Senior Dean, who forthwith laid forcible hands on Tom
Taylor. Thereupon ensued a regular scuffle, in which they both tumbled
on to the bed, and Tom Taylor got so much the worst of it that the
kindly agriculturist began to intercede, "Oh, please, Mr. Dean, don't
be too hard on the young man!"
Tennyson himself had been proctorized once or twice. Once, during the
first few days of his College life, he came out to receive a parcel by
a midnight mail. "Pray, sir, what are you doing at this time of
night?" said the Proctor. "And pray, sir, what business of yours is it
to ask me?" replied the Freshman, who in his innocence knew nothing
about the Proctor. He was told to call upon him next day, but then
explained his ignorance, and was let off.
On one occasion a throng of University men outside the Senate House
had been yelling against Whewell. Tennyson was standing by the door of
Macmillan's shop, and raised a counter-cry _for_ Whewell. He was,
however, seen standing, and was sent for to Whewell. "I was surprised,
sir, to see _you_ among that shouting mob the other day." "I was
shouting _for_ you," was the reply. Whewell was greatly pleased, and
grunted his approbation.
Another funny story. A wine-party was going on in Arthur Hallam's
rooms in the New Court, when enter angrily the Senior Dean, "Tommy
Thorp." "What is the meaning, Mr. Hallam, of all this noise?" "I am
very sorry, sir," said Hallam, "we had no idea we were making a
noise." "Well, gentlemen, if you'll all come down into the Court,
you'll _hear_ what a noise you're making." "Perhaps," admits Tennyson,
"I may have put in the _all_."
So ends my wife's short journal, and it only remains for me to sum up very
briefly the impressions left upon me, after a lapse of fifty, forty,
thirty, twenty years, by these visits to Farringford which once made so
large a part of my interest and my happiness.
Little as I am able to put these impressions into words, I can say with
truth that no personality with which I have ever come in close touch,
either seemed to me at the time, or has seemed in later recollection, to
cover so large, so rich, and so diverse a field for veneration, wonder,
and regard.
Tennyson was, and is, to me the most remarkable man that I have ever met.
Often when I was with him, whether in long walks or in his study, and when
I came to think of him silently afterwards, I used to recall his own lines
on Wellington:
Our greatest yet with least pretence...,
Rich in saving common-sense,
_And, as the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime_.
Simple, natural, shrewd, humorous; feeling strongly on a vast variety of
subjects, and saying freely just what he felt; passing rapidly and easily
from the gravest matters of speculation or conduct to some trifling or
amusing incident of the moment, or some recollection of the years of his
youth; he seemed to me unconscious of being a great man, though he must
have known himself to be one of the foremost thinkers, and quite the
foremost poet of his day. He was wholly free from affectation. He was
never an actor of a part. There was about him always an atmosphere of
truth.
Truth-teller was our Alfred named,
was a line that again and again recurred to the memory as one heard him
speak out his mind either on men, or on politics, or on the deepest
mysteries of philosophy or religion. He was pre-eminently one of the
Children of Light. Of light, whether from science, or from literary
criticism, or from the progress of the human conscience, he hailed
thankfully and expectantly every fresh disclosure. There was a deep
reverence in him for the Unseen, the Undiscovered, the as yet Unrevealed.
This on the intellectual side; and on the moral side there was a manly, a
devout, and a tender veneration for purity and innocence and trustfulness,
and, to borrow his own stately words, written early in his life:
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.
I regret that I cannot convey more worthily what I have felt in the
presence of this great and truly noble man. To go to either of his
beautiful homes, to see him as the husband of his wife and the father of
his sons, was to me and mine for many years a true pilgrimage, both of the
mind and of the heart. That I was once able to feel this, and that I am
able to feel it gratefully even now, I count among the richer blessings of
a long and happy life.
TENNYSON AND W. G. WARD AND OTHER FARRINGFORD FRIENDS
By WILFRID WARD
Among Tennyson's friends in his later years was my father--William George
Ward--who was his neighbour at Freshwater from 1870 to 1882. I have been
asked to contribute to the picture of "Tennyson and his Friends" some
account of their intercourse, and at the same time to set down some of the
extremely interesting comments on his own poems which I myself was
privileged yet later to hear from the Poet. I need not say that such an
act of piety in regard of two men for whom I have so deep a reverence is a
work of love, and I only regret that my recollections of what so well
deserves recording should be so imperfect and fragmentary.
Tennyson's friendship with my father began at a date considerably
subsequent to their first acquaintance. My father came rather unexpectedly
into the family property in the Isle of Wight in 1849 when his uncle died
without a son; but he did not desire to leave the house Pugin had built
for him in Hertfordshire, where he had settled immediately after he joined
the Catholic Church in 1845. He and the late Cardinal Vaughan were, in the
'fifties, doing a work for ecclesiastical education at St. Edmund's
College, Ware--a work which came to my father naturally as the sequel to
his share in the Oxford Movement. Therefore, when Tennyson in 1853 came to
live in the Isle of Wight my father was an absentee. He tried in 1858
for two years to live at his grandfather's old home near Cowes, Northwood
Park, but his health broke down, and he returned to Hertfordshire. In the
'sixties, however, he used to pay long visits to Freshwater, in the
scenery of which he delighted; and, on one of these occasions, Tennyson
was introduced to him by their common friend, Dean Bradley. The meeting
was not, I think, a great success on either side. Later on, however, in
1870, when my father, despairing of the Cowes climate, built a house at
Freshwater, he was Tennyson's near neighbour, and they soon became great
friends.
[Illustration: ARTHUR TENNYSON.]
Tennyson's friendship with my father grew up from close neighbourhood, and
from the fact that they had so much more in common with each other than
with most of their other Isle of Wight neighbours. It was cemented by my
father's devotion to Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Tennyson, who, in her
conversation, he always said, reminded him of the John Henry Newman of
Oxford days. Also they had many friends in common--such as Dean Stanley,
Lord Selborne, and Jowett--who often visited Freshwater. They were both
members of the Metaphysical Society, and loved to discuss in private
problems of religious faith which formed the subject of the Society's
debates. They were also both great Shakespearians. But most of all they
were drawn together by a simplicity and directness of mind, in which, I
think, they had few rivals--if I may say of my own father what every one
else said. Nevertheless, their intimacy was almost as remarkable for
diversity of interests as for similarity. It might seem at first sight to
be a point of similarity between them that each revelled in his way in the
scenery of the beautiful island which was their home. Yet the love of
external nature was very different in the two men. It had that marked
contrast which Ruskin has described in his _Modern Painters_. Ruskin
contrasts three typical ways of being affected by what is beautiful. There
is first "the man who perceives rightly because he does not feel, and to
whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose because he does not love
it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly because he feels, and to
whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose--a star, or a sun, or a
fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then lastly, there is the man
who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose
is for ever nothing else than itself--a little flower apprehended in the
very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the
associations and passions may be that crowd around it."
My father's imagination was of the second order, Tennyson's of the third.
My father often perceived wrongly, or not at all, because he felt so
strongly. Consequently, while the bold outlines of mountain scenery and
the large vistas of sea and down in the Isle of Wight moved him greatly,
he did not look at them with the accurate eye of an artist; and the minute
beauty of flowers and trees was non-existent for him. Tennyson, on the
contrary, had the most delicate and true perception of the minute as well
as the great. Each man chose for his home a site which suited his taste.
Weston was on a high hill with a wide view. Farringford was lower down and
buried in trees. The two men used sometimes to walk together on the great
Down which stretches from the Needles rocks to Freshwater Bay, on which
the boundary between Tennyson's property and my father's is marked by the
dyke beyond the Tennyson memorial cross. At other times they walked in the
Freshwater lanes. And there was a suggestion in these different
surroundings of their sympathy and of their difference. The immense
expanse of scenery visible from the Beacon Down was equally inspiring to
both, but the lanes and fields which were full of inspiration to Tennyson
had nothing in them which appealed to W. G. Ward. If he heard a bird
singing, the only suggestion it conveyed to him was of a tiresome being
who kept him awake at night. Trees were only the unpleasant screens which
stood in the way of the view of the Solent from his house, and which he
cut down as fast as they grew up. To Tennyson, on the contrary--as we see
constantly in his poetry--there was a whole world of interest in Nature
created by his knowledge of botany and natural history, as well as by his
exceptionally accurate and observant eye.
Let me quote the words of a great critic--the late Mr. Hutton--on this
characteristic of the Poet:
No poet has so many and such accurate references to the vegetable
world, and yet at the same time references so thoroughly poetic. He
calls dark hair
More black than ash-buds in the front of March;
auburn hair,
In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides three-fold to show the fruit within.
He is never tired of reflecting in his poetry the physiology of
flowers and trees and buds. The "living smoke" of the yew is twice
commemorated in his poems. He tells us how the sunflower, "shining
fair,"
Rays round with flames her disk of seed;
observes on the blasts "that blow the poplars white"; and, to make a
long story short--for the list of instances might be multiplied to
hundreds--in his latest published "Idylls of the King," he thus dates
an early hour in the night:
Nigh upon that hour
When the lone hern forgets his melancholy,
_Lets down his other leg_, and, stretching, dreams
Of goodly supper in the distant pool.
When Tennyson and W. G. Ward walked together there was then a most
curious contrast in their attitude towards the Nature that surrounded
them,--Tennyson noting every bird, every flower, every tree, as he passed
it, Ward buried in the conversation, and alive only to the great, broad
effects in the surrounding country.
W. G. Ward was himself not only no poet, but almost barbarously
indifferent to poetry, with some few exceptions. He was exceedingly frank
with Tennyson, and plainly intimated to him that there was very little in
his poetry that he understood or cared for. But this fact never impaired
their friendship. Indeed, I think Tennyson enjoyed his almost eccentric
candour in this and in other matters, and he used, in later years, to tell
me stories which illustrated it. Once when the question of persecution had
been debated at the Metaphysical Society he remarked to my father, "You
know you would try to get me put into prison if the Pope told you to."
"Your father would not say 'No,'" Tennyson said to me. "He only replied,
'The Pope would never tell me to do anything so foolish.'"
I think his intercourse with my father did a good deal to diminish a
certain prejudice against Roman Catholicism; and his intimacy with my
father's chaplain--Father Haythornthwaite, a man as opposed to the popular
conception of a Jesuit as could well be imagined--told in the same
direction. "When Haythornthwaite dies," Tennyson once said, "I shall write
as his epitaph: 'Here lies Peter Haythornthwaite, Human by nature, Roman
by fate!'"
W. G. Ward's own extreme frankness led Tennyson to remark to a friend:
"The popular idea of Roman Catholics as Jesuitical and untruthful is
contrary to my own experience. The most truthful man I ever met was an
Ultramontane. He was grotesquely truthful."
Tennyson would sometimes retort in kind to my father's frank criticisms,
and once, after vainly trying to decipher one of his letters, observed
that the handwriting was "like walking-sticks gone mad," a curiously true
description of my father's very peculiar characters.[64]
As with scenery, so with poetry; my father only took in broad effects and
simple pathos, and would single out for special admiration such a poem as
the "Children's Hospital," over which he shed many tears.
Tennyson soon accustomed himself to my father's indifference to his poetry
in general. But he hoped that, at all events, his metaphysical poems would
interest his neighbour, and sent him the MS. of "De Profundis" when he
wrote it; but the reply was only an entreaty that he would put explanatory
notes to it when it should be published. One exception, however, must be
made in favour of "Becket," which Tennyson read aloud to Ward, who,
greatly to his own surprise, admired it enthusiastically. "How do you like
it?" Tennyson asked, and the reply was, "Very much, though I did not
expect to like it at all. It is quite splendid. The development of
character in Chancellor and Archbishop is wonderfully drawn. Where did you
learn it all?"