so near an answer and yet never are answered. At the hour of death what
are the sights which rush upon the vision? Of these he would sometimes
speak; he told me how William Allingham, when dying, said to his wife, "I
see things beyond your imagination to conceive." Some vision seemed to
come to such at death. One lady in the Isle of Wight exclaimed, as though
she saw "Cherubim and Seraphim." But these incidents did not disturb the
steady thought and trust which found its strength far deeper down than in
any surface phenomena. He never shirked the hard and dismaying facts of
life. Once he made me take to my room Winwoode Reade's _Martyrdom of Man_.
There never was such a passionate philippic against Nature as this book
contained. The universe was one vast scene of murder; the deep aspirations
and noble visions of men were the follies of flies buzzing for a brief
moment in the presence of inexorable destruction. Life was bottled
sunshine; death the silent-footed butler who withdrew the cork. The book,
with its fierce invective, had a strange rhapsodical charm. It put with
irate and verbose extravagance the fact that sometimes
Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With ravin shrieked against his creed;
but it failed to see any but one side of the question. The writer saw
clearly enough what Tennyson saw, but Tennyson saw much more. He could not
make his judgment blind against faith any more than he would make it blind
against facts. He saw more clearly because he saw more largely. He
distrusted narrow views from whatever side they were advanced. The same
spirit which led him to see the danger of the dogmatic temper in so-called
orthodox circles led him to distrust it when it came from other quarters.
There was a wholesome balance about his mind. Nothing is farther from the
truth than to suppose that men of great genius lack mental balance. Among
the lesser lights there may be a brilliant but unbalanced energy, but
among the greater men it is not so; there is a large and wholesome sanity
among these. There is sufficient breadth of grasp to avoid extremes in
Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; it was the same with Tennyson. We may be
right, for instance, in classing Tennyson among those
Whose faith has centre everywhere
Nor cares to fix itself to form;
but we should be wholly wrong if we supposed that he did not realize the
value of form. He knew that faith did not lie in the form, but he knew
also the protective value of form to faith; the shell was not the kernel,
but the kernel ripened all the better in the shelter of the shell. He
realized how sacred was the flesh and blood to which truth divine might be
linked, and he uttered the wise caution:
Hold thou the good: defend it well
For fear divine philosophy
Should push beyond her mark and be
Procuress to the lords of Hell.
In his view, as it seemed to me, there were two attitudes of mind towards
dogmatic forms--the one impatient of form because form was never adequate
to express the whole truth, the other impatient of form[74] because
impatient of the truth itself. These two attitudes of mind were poles
asunder; they must never be confused together.
I may be allowed to illustrate this discriminating spirit by one or two
reminiscences. I once asked him whether they were right who interpreted
the three ladies who accompanied King Arthur on his last voyage as Faith,
Hope, and Charity. He replied with a touch of (shall I call it?)
intellectual impatience: "They do and they do not. They are those graces,
but they are much more than those. I hate to be tied down to say, 'This
means that,' because the thought in the image is much more than the
definition suggested or any specific interpretation advanced." The truth
was wider than the form, yet the form was a shelter for the truth. It
meant this, but not this only; truth must be able to transcend any form in
which it may be presented.
Hence he could see piety under varying forms: for example, he described
those who were "pious variers from the Church." This phrase, it may here
be related, had a remarkable influence on one man's life, as the following
letter, written by a clergyman who had formerly been a Nonconformist, will
show. The writer died some few years ago; two of his sons are now good and
promising clergymen of the Church of England:
OXFORD VILLAS, GUISELEY, LEEDS,
_January 16, 1901_.
MY LORD BISHOP--In reference to your volume on the Poets, may I
intrude upon your attention one moment to say that it was Tennyson's
phrase in reference to dissenters:
Pious variers from the Church,
in his "Sea Dreams" that first kindled me to earnest thought (some
twenty years since) as to my own position in relationship to the
Church of the land. The force that moved me lay in the word "pious."
Were dissenters more pious than Church people? I regret to say I
thought them much less so; and as this conviction deepened I was
compelled to make the change for which I am every day more
thankful.--I am, my Lord Bishop, your Lordship's devoted servant,
W. HAYWARD ELLIOTT.
I have already spoken of his recognition of the apparent dualism in
Nature. His outlook on the universe could not ignore the dark and
dismaying facts of existence, and his faith, which rose above the shriek
of Nature, was not based upon arguments derived from any survey of
external, physical Nature. When he confined his outlook to this, he could
see power and mechanism, but he could not from these derive faith. His
vision must go beyond the mere physical universe; he must see life and see
it whole; he must include that which is highest in Nature, even man, and
only then could he find the resting-place of faith. He thus summed up the
matter once when we had been walking up and down the "Ball-room" at
Farringford: "It is hard," he said, "it is hard to believe in God; but it
is harder not to believe. I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature,
but from what I find in man." I took him to mean that the witness of
Nature was only complete when it included all that was in Nature, and that
the effort to draw conclusions from Nature when man, the highest-known
factor in Nature, was excluded, could only lead to mistake. I do not think
he meant, however, that external Nature gave no hints of a superintending
wisdom or even love, for his own writings show, I think, that such hints
had been whispered to him by flower and star; I think he meant that faith
did not find her platform finally secure beneath her feet till she had
taken count of man. In short, he seemed to me to be near to the position
of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, who said that truth as soon as learned was
felt to be held on a much deeper and more unshakable ground than any
authority which appealed to mere intellect, namely, on its own discerned
truthfulness. The response to all that is highest in Nature is found in
the heart of man, and man cannot deny this highest, because it is latent
in himself already. But I must continue Tennyson's own words: "It is hard
to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don't
believe in His goodness from what I see in Nature. In Nature I see the
mechanician; I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast."
I said, "Then you believe that Man is the highest witness of God?"
"Certainly," he replied. I said, "Is not that what Christ said and was? He
was in man the highest witness of God to Man," and I quoted the recorded
words, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." He assented, but said
that there were, of course, difficulties in the idea of a Trinity--the
Three. "But mind," he said, "Son of God is quite right--that He was."[75]
He said that, of course, we must have doctrine, and then he added, "After
all, the greatest thing is Faith." Having said this, he paused, and then
recited with earnest emphasis the lines which sang of faith in the reality
of the Unseen and Spiritual, of a faith, therefore, which can wait the
great disclosure:
Doubt no longer, that the Highest is the wisest and the best,
Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope, or break thy rest,
Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling
Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest.
Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart's desire;
Thro' the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.
Wait till death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker
Dark no more with human hatred in the glare of deathless fire.
He was alive to the movements of modern thought. He saw in evolution, if
not a fully proved law, yet a magnificent working hypothesis; he could not
regard it as a theory hostile to ultimate faith; but far beyond the
natural wish to reconcile faith and thought, which he shared with all
right-thinking men, was the conviction of the changeless personal
relationship between God and man. He might find difficulties about faith
and about certain dogmas of faith, such as the Trinity. No doubt, however,
the Poet's conception brought the divine into all human life; it showed
God in touch with us at all epochs of our existence--in our origin, in our
history, in our final self-realization, for He is
Our Father and our Brother and our God.[76]
Religion largely lies in the consciousness of our true relation to Him who
made us; and the yearning for the realization of this consciousness found
constant expression in Tennyson's works and conversation.[77] Perhaps its
clearest expression is to be found in his instructions to his son:
"Remember, I want 'Crossing the Bar' to be always at the end of all my
works."
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the Bar.
TENNYSON AND SIR JOHN SIMEON, AND TENNYSON'S LAST YEARS
By LOUISA E. WARD[78]
From the misty dawn of early childhood rises the first image of one who
was to fill so large a place in my life and that of those dear to me. As
I, not yet four years old, lay in my father's arms and he said to me the
"Morte d'Arthur," there blended with the picture of the wild winter mere
and the mighty King carried, dying, to its shore, a vision of the man who,
my father told me, lived somewhere amongst us and who could write words
which seemed to me more beautiful than anything I had ever heard.
It was several years before I again came upon the "Morte d'Arthur," when I
was a girl of ten or eleven, and I remember how eagerly I seized upon it,
and how the fairy glamour of my infancy came back to me as I read it.
It was in the autumn of 1852 that Lord and Lady (then Mr. and Mrs.)
Tennyson came to Farringford. They had been looking for a house, and they
found themselves one summer evening on the terrace walk, with the rosy
sunset lighting up the long line of coast to St. Catherine's Point, and
the gold-blue sea with its faint surf line mingling with the rosiness: and
they said, "We will go no further, this must be our home." An ideal
home it was, ideal in its loveliness, its repose, in its wild but
beautiful gardens, and more than all ideal in its calm serenity, the
hospitable simplicity, the high thought and utter nobleness of aim and
life which that pair brought with them, and which through the long years
of change, of sickness, and of sorrow, of which every home must be the
scene, made the atmosphere of Farringford impossible to be forgotten by
those who had the happiness of breathing it.
[Illustration: THE CORNER OF THE STUDY AT FARRINGFORD WHERE TENNYSON
WROTE, WITH HIS DEERHOUND "LUFRA" AND THE TERRIER "WINKS" IN THE
FOREGROUND. From a drawing by W. Biscombe Gardner.]
Hallam was at that time a baby, and very soon after their arrival at
Farringford beautiful Lionel came to gladden the hearts of his parents. It
was on the day of Lionel's christening that my father paid his first visit
to Farringford, and found the family party just returning from church. My
father had already been introduced to Tennyson at Lady Ashburton's house
in London, on which occasion he had walked away with Carlyle and had
expressed to him his pleasure at meeting so great a man as Tennyson.
"Great man," said Carlyle, "yes, he is nearly a great man, but not quite;
he stands on a dunghill with yelping dogs about him, and if he were quite
a great man, he would call down fire from Heaven, and burn them
up"--"but," he went on, speaking of his poetry, "he has the grip on it."
My father had entertained the greatest admiration for Tennyson's poetry
since the day when, both being undergraduates at Christchurch, his friend
Charles Wynne brought him the first published volume, saying to him,
"There is something new for you who love poetry." And his delight may be
imagined in now having the Poet for a neighbour. The intimacy between
Farringford and Swainston grew apace. My mother and Lady Tennyson, though
poor health and numerous occupations interfered with their frequent
meetings, conceived a very real affection for each other, which was only
cut short by my mother's early death, which left Lady Tennyson with a deep
feeling and pity for her children.
During the early years of Farringford, it was one of my father's great and
frequent pleasures to ride or drive over in the summer afternoons; he, in
turn with her husband, would draw Lady Tennyson in her garden chair, and
with the two boys skipping on before them, they would go long expeditions
through the lanes, and even up the downs; then back through the soft
evening air to dinner, and the long evening of talk and reading which
knitted that "fair companionship" and made of it "such a friendship as had
mastered time," and which we may well believe has re-formed itself still
more perfectly now that both those beloved souls have "crossed the bar."
The Tennysons sometimes came over to Swainston for a few days, and I
remember his being there on the wonderful July night in 1858 when the tail
of the great comet passed over Arcturus. His admiration and excitement
knew no bounds; he could not sit at the dinner-table, but rushed out
perpetually to look at the glorious sight, repeating: "It is a besom of
destruction sweeping the sky."
Little Lionel was that same night taken from his bed to the window, and,
opening his sleepy eyes on the unaccustomed splendour, he said, "Am I in
Heaven?"
The writing and publication of "Maud" in 1855 was largely due to my
father.
Looking through some papers one day at Farringford with his friend, he
came upon the exquisite lyric "O that 'twere possible," and said, "Why do
you keep these beautiful lines unpublished?" Tennyson told him that the
poem had appeared years before in the _Tribute_, an ephemeral publication,
but that it was really intended to belong to a dramatic poem which he had
never been able to carry out. My father gave him no peace till he had
persuaded him to set about the poem, and not very long after, he put
"Maud" into his hand.
It was about this time, but I do not remember what year, that Tennyson
gave my father the manuscript of "In Memoriam."[79] He had often asked him
to give him a manuscript poem, and he had put him off, but one day at
Swainston he asked my father to reach him a particular book from a shelf
in the library, and as he did so, down fell the MS. which Tennyson had put
there as a surprise. Never was gift more valued and appreciated by its
recipient. I have always felt grateful to him for the continual pleasure
which it gave my father during the whole of his life.
Tennyson's visits were eagerly looked forward to by us children. He would
talk to us a good deal, and was fond of puzzling and mystifying us in a
way that was very fascinating. He would take the younger ones on his knee,
and give them sips of his port after dinner, and I remember my father
saying to one of my sisters: "Never forget that the greatest of poets has
kissed you and made you drink from his glass."
As I got older I was sometimes allowed to drive over to Farringford with
my father, and, need I say, I looked forward to these as the red-letter
days of my life. Not only were the talk and intellectual atmosphere
intoxicating to me, but I became passionately attached to Lady Tennyson.
Praise of her would be unseemly; but I may quote what my father was fond
of saying of her, that she was "a piece of the finest china, the mould of
which had been broken as soon as she was made." It was not, however, till
after my mother's death in 1860 that my real grown-up intimacy with them
began, and that Farringford became the almost second home which for some
years it was to me. During my father's absences in London or elsewhere, I
was free to go and stay there as often and for as long as I liked, and was
almost on the footing of a daughter of the house. I used to go for long
walks, sometimes alone with Tennyson, sometimes in the company of other
guests, of whom Mr. Jowett was one of the most frequent. I wish I had
written down the talks with which he made the hours pass like minutes
during our walks. Forgetful of the youth and ignorance of his companion,
he would rise to the highest themes, thread his way through the deepest
speculations, till I caught the infection of his mind, and the questions
of matter and spirit, of space and the infinite, of time and of eternity,
and such kindred subjects, became to me the burning questions, the supreme
interests of life! But however absorbed he might be in earnest talk, his
eye and ear were always alive to the natural objects around him: I have
known him stop short in a sentence to listen to a blackbird's song, to
watch the sunlight glint on a butterfly's wing, or to examine a field
flower at his feet. The lines on "The Flower" were the result of an
investigation of the "love-in-idleness" growing on a wall in the
Farringford garden. He made them nearly on the spot, and said them to me
next day. Trees and plants had a special attraction for him, and he longed
to see the vegetation of the Tropics. Years ago he scolded my husband more
than half in earnest for not having told him in time that he was going to
winter in Madeira, that he might have gone with him.
But to return to my girlish days at Farringford! The afternoon walks were
followed by the long talks in the firelight by the side of Lady Tennyson's
sofa, talks less eager, less thrilling than those I have recalled; but so
helpful, so tender, full of the wisdom of one who had learnt to look upon
life and all it embraces from one standpoint only, and that the very
highest! Then dinner with the two boys (their long fair hair hanging over
their shoulders and their picturesque dresses as they are seen in Mr.
Watts's picture in the drawing-room at Aldworth) waiting as little pages
on the guests at table, followed by the delightful dessert, for which,
according to the old College fashion, we adjourned to the drawing-room.
The meal was seasoned with merry genial talk, unexpected guests arriving,
and always finding the same warm welcome, for none came who were not tried
and trusted friends. After dessert Tennyson went up to his study[80] (the
little room at the top of the house, from the leads outside which such sky
pageants have been seen, shooting stars, eclipses, and Northern Lights)
with any men friends who were in the house. They smoked there for an hour
or two, and then came down to tea, unless, as sometimes happened, we all
joined them upstairs; and then there was more talk or reading aloud of
published or, still better, unpublished poems. He would sometimes read
from other poets; Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and some lyrics of Campbell
being what he often chose; and he taught me to know and appreciate Crabbe,
whom he placed very high in the rank of English poets.
One day Tennyson came behind me as I sat at breakfast, and dropped on my
plate the MS. of the "Higher Pantheism" which he had composed, or at any
rate perfected, during the night. Another day he took me into the garden
to see a smoking yew, and said the lines on it which he had just made and
afterwards interpolated in "In Memoriam." My father was with him when they
came upon a bed of forget-me-not in the garden and he exclaimed "the
heavens upbreaking through the earth," the lines which he afterwards
applied to the bluebells in the description of the spring ride of
Guinevere and Lancelot to Arthur's court. Once he pleased and touched me
inexpressibly: he was talking of the different way in which friends speak
before your face and behind your back, and he said, "Now I should not mind
being behind the curtain while L. S. was talking of me, and there are very
few of whom I could say that."
Years went on, and changes came; my father's re-election to Parliament in
1865 made our seasons in London longer and more regular than they had
been, and though there was still constant and delightful intercourse with
Farringford during the autumn and winter, there was necessarily less
during the Session. Some glorious days there were, however, when at Easter
or at Whitsuntide my father went down to Swainston, and I sometimes
accompanied him. We always went over to Farringford either to spend a
night or two, or to drive back through the spring night with its scented
breath and its mad revelry of cuckoos and nightingales vying with each
other as to which could outshout the other, and my father, fresh from
communion with his friend, would open himself out as he rarely did at any
other time or place.
It was about this time that Tennyson and his wife, worried beyond bearing
by the rudeness and vulgarity of the tourists, who considered that they
could best show admiration for the Poet by entirely refusing to respect
his privacy, determined to find another house for themselves during the
summer months, and turned their thoughts to Blackdown and its
neighbourhood. One summer they rented a farm on Blackdown called, I think,
Greyshott, and on a fine morning, April 23, 1868, we stood, a party of
some fifteen friends, to see the foundation-stone laid of Aldworth, the
new home which, to more recent, though not to the older friends, has
become almost as much associated with its owner as Farringford, and
received the sorrowful consecration of having been the scene of his
passing away.
About this time Tennyson took to coming oftener to London. On one occasion
he took me with him to the British Museum, and we did not get beyond the
Elgin Marbles, such was their fascination for him. Another day he came to
our house at luncheon time; most of the family happened to be out, and he
proposed that we should go to the Zoological Gardens. London was at its
fullest, and I feared, though I did not say it, that he would not escape
recognition, which was of all things what he most hated. However, all went
well for some time until we went into the Aquarium, and he became greatly
absorbed in the sea monsters, when I heard a whisper in the crowd, "That's
Tennyson," and knew that in another minute he would be surrounded; so I
suddenly discovered that the heat of the Aquarium was unbearable and
carried him off unwillingly to a quieter part of the gardens--he never
found out my ruse.
My mind lingers willingly on the last years of the sixties. As I look back
the two-and-twenty years seem, as did another "two and thirty years," a
"mist that rolls away." Of the circle of dear friends who were so much to
one another some still remain to gladden us with their presence, but how
many have gone where "beyond these voices there is peace"--Mr. George
Venables, Mr. John Ball, Mr. Browning, Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Brookfield, Mr.
Henry Cowper, Mr. Laurence Oliphant. The circle was complete as the Table
of Arthur before the fatal quest had made its gaps; here death was the
quest, and each one who sought, alas, has found it!
The first to pass away was my father, and as his best friend walked in the
garden at Swainston on the day, May 31, 1870, on which he came to see him
laid to rest, he made those verses,[81] than which few lovelier tributes
were ever paid from friend to friend, and which will keep the name of the
"Prince of Courtesy" green even in the long years to come.