bigger than yours. It is wrapped up ready to go by the book-post, and
only wants to know to which of your many mansions it is to be
directed.
Fitz's box, which is about as large as a tailor's box for a single
suit, contains a drawing of Thackeray's, an illustration of the "Lord
of Burghley," a pretty sketch of the landskip-painter and the village
maiden. He sent it here under the vain delusion that whenever you
happened to come to London I should be sure to know. And I presume he
sent word to you of what he had done, for he did not ask me to
communicate the fact. I was only to write to _him_ in case the box did
_not_ arrive, and as the box did arrive I did not write. If you will
let me know what you wish to be done with it, I will do with it
accordingly.
There is a line in your last volume which I can't read: the last line
but one of the "flower in the crannied wall."
In the course of the same year he edited the _Conference of Pleasure_,
written by Bacon for some masque or festive occasion, and printed from a
MS. belonging to the Duke of Northumberland which had been slightly
injured by fire. FitzGerald, in a letter to me, says of it:
Spedding's Introduction to his grilled Bacon, I call it really a
beautiful little _Idyll_, the mechanical Job done so perfectly and so
elegantly.
But while he was engaged in the great labour of his life he found time to
write beautiful pieces of criticism on Shakespeare to which FitzGerald
would willingly have had him devote his whole attention. "I never heard
him read a page," he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock, "but he threw some
new light upon it." In the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for August 1850 he
contributed a paper on "Who wrote Shakespeare's _Henry VIII._?" which he
discussed with characteristic thoroughness. His conclusion was that it was
the work of two authors, one of whom was Fletcher, and this was confirmed
by the investigations of another enquirer, who independently arrived at
substantially the same result. The division of the Acts in _Much Ado_,
_Twelfth Night_, _Richard II._, and _King Lear_ formed the subject of
other discussions, and these he considered his most valuable contribution
to the restoration of Shakespeare. A criticism of Miss Kate Terry's acting
in Viola gave him the opportunity of pointing out the corruptions by which
the fine comedy, _Twelfth Night_, has been degraded into farce.
"Spedding says," FitzGerald writes in 1875 to Fanny Kemble, "that
Irving's Hamlet is simply--_hideous_--a strong expression for Spedding
to use. But--(lest I should think his condemnation was only the Old
Man's fault of depreciating all that is new) he extols Miss Ellen
Terry's Portia as simply _a perfect Performance_: remembering (he
says) all the while how fine was Fanny Kemble's."
Again to the same correspondent early in 1880 he says:
By far the chief incident in my life for the last month has been the
reading of dear old Spedding's Paper on the _Merchant of Venice_,
there, at any rate, is one Question settled, and in such a beautiful
way as only he commands. I could not help writing a few lines to tell
him what I thought, but even very sincere praise is not the way to
conciliate him. About Christmas I wrote him, relying on it that I
should be most likely to secure an answer if I expressed dissent from
some other work of his, and my expectation was justified by one of the
fullest answers he had written to me for many a day and year.
The paper referred to was "The Story of the _Merchant of Venice_" in the
_Cornhill Magazine_ for March 1880. In sending a copy to Frederick
Tennyson he says:
I now post you a paper by old Spedding--a very beautiful one, I think;
_settling_ one point, however unimportant, and in a graceful, as well
as logical, way such as he is Master of.
A case has been got up--whether by Irving, the Stage Representative of
Shylock, or by his Admirers--to prove the Jew to be a very amiable and
ill-used man: insomuch that one is to come away from the theatre
loving him and hating all the rest. He dresses himself up to look like
the Saviour, Mrs. Kemble says. So old Jem disposes of _that_, besides
unravelling Shakespeare's mechanism of the Novel he draws from, in a
manner (as Jem says) more distinct to us than in his treatment of any
other of his Plays "not professedly historical." And this latter point
is, of course, far more interesting than the question of Irving and
Co.,--which is a simple attempt, both of Actor and Writer, to strike
out an original idea in the teeth of common-sense and Tradition.
And now came the end, unexpected and the result of an accident, which he
maintained was entirely his own fault. In writing to tell me of the fatal
result, one of his dearest friends said:
I grieve to tell you that all is over with our dear old friend.... He
intended to cross before two carriages--crossed before one--found
there was not time to pass before the other, and instead of pausing
stepped back under the hansom which he had not seen, and which had not
time to alter its course. He spent more strength in exculpating the
poor driver than on any personal matter during his illness as soon as
he regained memory of the circumstances.
"Mowbray Donne," says FitzGerald, when all was over, "wrote me that
Laurence had been there four or five days ago, when Spedding said,
that had the Cab done but a little more, it would have been a good
Quietus. Socrates to the last."
And in another letter:
Tennyson called at the Hospital, but was not allowed to see him,
though Hallam did, I think. Some one calling afterwards, Spedding took
the doctor's arm, and asked, "Was it Mr. Tennyson?" Doctors and nurses
all devoted to the patient man.
To Fanny Kemble he writes:
It was very, very good and kind of you to write to me about Spedding.
Yes: Aldis Wright had apprised me of the matter just after it
happened--he happening to be in London at the time; and but two days
after the accident heard that Spedding was quite calm, and even
cheerful; only anxious that Wright himself should not be kept waiting
for some communication which S. had promised him! Whether to live, or
to die, he will be Socrates still.
Directly that I heard from Wright I wrote to Mowbray Donne to send me
just a Post Card--daily, if he or his wife could, with but one or two
words on it--"Better," "Less well," or whatever it might be. This
morning I hear that all is going on even better than could be
expected, according to Miss Spedding. But I suppose the Crisis, which
you tell me of, is not yet come; and I have always a terror of that
French Adage--"_Monsieur se porte mal--Monsieur se porte
mieux--Monsieur est--_" Ah, you know, or you guess, the rest.
My dear old Spedding, though I have not seen him these twenty years
and more--and probably should never see him again--but he lives--his
old Self--in my heart of hearts; and all I hear of him does but
embellish the recollection of him--if it could be embellished--for he
is but the same that he was from a Boy--all that is best in Heart and
Head--a man that would be incredible had one not known him.
Again he writes of him to Professor Norton:
He was the wisest man I have known; a great sense of Humour, a
Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Serenity so
long as Consciousness lasted. I suppose something of him will reach
America, I mean, of his Death; run over by a Cab and dying in St.
George's Hospital to which he was taken, and from which he could not
be removed home alive.
"I did not know," he says in another letter, "that I should feel
Spedding's Loss as I do, after an interval of more than twenty years
[since] meeting him. But I knew that I could always get the Word I
wanted of him by Letter, and also that from time to time I should
meet with some of his wise and delightful Papers in some Quarter or
other. He talked of Shakespeare, I am told, when his Mind wandered. I
wake almost every morning feeling as if I had lost something, as one
does in a Dream; and truly enough, I have lost _him_. 'Matthew is in
his Grave, etc.'"
In apologizing to Fanny Kemble for not writing to her as usual, he says:
I have let the Full Moon pass because you had written to me so lately,
and so kindly, about our lost Spedding, that I could not call on you
too soon again. Of him I will say nothing except that his Death has
made me recall very many passages in his Life in which I was partly
concerned. In particular, staying at his Cumberland Home along with
Tennyson in the May of 1835.... His Father and Mother were both
alive--he a wise man, who mounted his Cob after Breakfast, and was at
his Farm till Dinner at two--then away again till Tea: after which he
sat reading by a shaded lamp: saying very little, but always courteous
and quite content with any company his Son might bring to the house,
so long as they let him go his way: which indeed he would have gone
whether they let him or no. But he had seen enough of Poets not to
like them or their Trade: Shelley for a time living among the Lakes:
Coleridge at Southey's (whom perhaps he had a respect for--Southey, I
mean); and Wordsworth, whom I do not think he valued. He was rather
jealous of "Jem," who might have done available service in the world,
he thought, giving himself up to such Dreamers; and sitting up with
Tennyson conning over the "Morte d'Arthur," "Lord of Burleigh," and
other things which helped to make up the two Volumes of 1842. So I
always associate that Arthur Idyll with Basanthwaite Lake, under
Skiddaw. Mrs. Spedding was a sensible, motherly Lady, with whom I used
to play Chess of a Night. And there was an old Friend of hers, Miss
Bristowe, who always reminded me of Miss La Creevy, if you know of
such a Person in _Nickleby_.
We will conclude with what his old friend, Sir Henry Taylor, wrote of him
after his death:
As he will not read what I write I may allow myself to say something
more. He was always master of himself and of his emotions; but
underlying a somewhat melancholy composure and aspect there were
depths of tenderness known only to those who knew his whole nature and
his inward life, and it is well for those by whom he is mourned if
they can find what he has described in a letter to be his great
consolation in all his experiences of the death of those he loved
(experiences which had begun early and had not been few), "that the
past is sacred and sanctified; nothing can happen hereafter to disturb
or obliterate it; nor need the recollection have any bitterness if a
man does not, out of a false and morbid sentiment, make it so for
himself."
And he adds:
To me there are no companions more welcome, cordial, consolatory or
cheerful than my dead friends.
ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM
[Illustration: ARTHUR HALLAM READING "WALTER SCOTT" ALOUD ON BOARD THE
"LEEDS," BOUND FROM BORDEAUX TO DUBLIN, SEPT. 9, 1830.
After Tennyson's and Hallam's memorable journey to the Pyrenees in aid of
the revolutionary movement against King Ferdinand of Spain, vividly
described by Carlyle in his _Life of John Sterling_.
Alfred Tennyson (in profile), John Harden and Mrs. Harden (on the left),
and the Miss Hardens.]
ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM
By DR. JOHN BROWN
[The following article, containing the Memoir of Arthur Hallam by his
father, Henry Hallam, is reprinted from _Horae Subsecivae_.--ED.]
PRAESENS imperfectum,--perfectum, plusquam perfectum
FUTURUM.--GROTIUS.
The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep
Into my study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of thy life
Shall come apparelled in more precious habit--
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of my soul,
Than when thou livedst indeed.
_Much Ado about Nothing._
In the chancel of Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, rest the mortal remains
of Arthur Henry Hallam, eldest son of our great philosophic historian and
critic,--and the friend to whom "In Memoriam" is sacred. This place was
selected by his father, not only from the connection of kindred, being the
burial-place of his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton, but likewise
"on account of its still and sequestered situation, on a lone hill that
overhangs the Bristol Channel." That lone hill, with its humble old
church, its outlook over the waste of waters, where "the stately ships go
on," was, we doubt not, in Tennyson's mind when the poem, "Break, break,
break," which contains the burden of that volume in which are enshrined so
much of the deepest affection, poetry, philosophy, and godliness, rose
into his "study of imagination"--"into the eye and prospect of his
soul."[110]
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Out of these few simple words, deep and melancholy, and sounding as the
sea, as out of a well of the living waters of love, flows forth all "In
Memoriam," as a stream flows out of its spring-all is here. "I would that
my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me,"--"the touch of the
vanished hand--the sound of the voice that is still,"--the body and soul
of his friend. Rising as it were out of the midst of the gloom of the
valley of the shadow of death:
The mountain infant to the sun comes forth
Like human life from darkness;
and how its waters flow on! carrying life, beauty, magnificence,--shadows
and happy lights, depths of blackness, depths clear as the very body of
heaven. How it deepens as it goes, involving larger interests, wider
views, "thoughts that wander through eternity," greater affections, but
still retaining its pure living waters, its unforgotten burden of love and
sorrow. How it visits every region! "The long unlovely street," pleasant
villages and farms, "the placid ocean-plains," waste howling wildernesses,
grim woods, _nemorumque noctem_, informed with spiritual fears, where may
be seen, if shapes they may be called:
Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton,
And Time the Shadow;
now within hearing of the Minster clock, now of the College bells, and the
vague hum of the mighty city. And overhead through all its course the
heaven with its clouds, its sun, moon, and stars; but always, and in all
places, declaring its source; and even when laying its burden of manifold
and faithful affection at the feet of the Almighty Father, still
remembering whence it came:
That friend of mine who lives in God,
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
It is to that chancel, and to the day, 3rd January 1834, that he refers in
Poem XVIII. of "In Memoriam":
'Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
'Tis little; but it looks in truth
As if the quiet bones were blest
Among familiar names to rest
And in the places of his youth.
And again in XIX.:
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken'd heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
Here, too, it is, LXVII.:
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.
This young man, whose memory his friend has consecrated in the hearts of
all who can be touched by such love and beauty, was in nowise unworthy of
all this. It is not for us to say, for it was not given to us the sad
privilege to know, all that a father's heart buried with his son in that
grave, all "the hopes of unaccomplished years"; nor can we feel in its
fulness all that is meant by
such
A friendship as had master'd Time;
Which masters Time indeed, and is
Eternal, separate from fears:
The all-assuming months and years
Can take no part away from this.
But this we may say, we know nothing of in all literature to compare with
the volume from which these lines are taken, since David lamented with
this lamentation: "The beauty of Israel is slain. Ye mountains of Gilboa,
let there be no dew, neither rain upon you. I am distressed for thee, my
brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me, thy love for me
was wonderful." We cannot, as some have done, compare it with
Shakespeare's sonnets, or with "Lycidas." In spite of the amazing genius
and tenderness, the never-wearying, all-involving reiteration of
passionate attachment, the idolatry of admiring love, the rapturous
devotedness, displayed in these sonnets, we cannot but agree with Mr.
Hallam in thinking "that there is a tendency now, especially among young
men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of these remarkable
productions"; and though we would hardly say with him, "that it is
impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written them," giving
us, as they do, and as perhaps nothing else could do, such proof of a
power of loving, of an amount of _attendrissement_, which is not less
wonderful than the bodying forth of that myriad-mind which gave us Hamlet,
and Lear, Cordelia, and Puck, and all the rest, and indeed explaining to
us how he could give us all these;--while we hardly go so far, we agree
with his other wise words:--"There is a weakness and folly in all
misplaced and excessive affection"; which in Shakespeare's case is the
more distressing, when we consider that "Mr. W. H., the only begetter of
these ensuing sonnets," was, in all likelihood, William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, a man of noble and gallant character, but always of licentious
life.
As for "Lycidas," we must confess that the poetry--and we all know how
consummate it is--and not the affection, seems uppermost in Milton's mind,
as it is in ours. The other element, though quick and true, has no glory
through reason of the excellency of that which invests it. But there is no
such drawback in "In Memoriam." The purity, the temperate but fervent
goodness, the firmness and depth of nature, the impassioned logic, the
large, sensitive, and liberal heart, the reverence and godly fear, of
That friend of mine who lives in God,
which from these Remains we know to have dwelt in that young soul, give to
"In Memoriam" the character of exactest portraiture. There is no excessive
or misplaced affection here; it is all founded in fact: while everywhere
and throughout it all, affection--a love that is wonderful--meets us first
and leaves us last, giving form and substance and grace, and the breath of
life and love, to everything that the poet's thick-coming fancies so
exquisitely frame. We can recall few poems approaching to it in this
quality of sustained affection. The only English poems we can think of as
of the same order, are Cowper's lines on seeing his mother's portrait:
O that these lips had language!
Burns' "To Mary in Heaven"; and two pieces of Vaughan--one beginning
O thou who know'st for whom I mourn;
and the other:
They are all gone into the world of light.
But our object now is, not so much to illustrate Mr. Tennyson's verses, as
to introduce to our readers, what we ourselves have got so much delight,
and, we trust, profit from--_The Remains in Verse and Prose, of Arthur
Henry Hallam_, 1834; privately printed. We had for many years been
searching for this volume, but in vain; a sentence quoted by Henry Taylor
struck us, and our desire was quickened by reading "In Memoriam." We do
not remember when we have been more impressed than by these Remains of
this young man, especially when taken along with his friend's Memorial;
and instead of trying to tell our readers what this impression is, we have
preferred giving them as copious extracts as our space allows, that they
may judge and enjoy for themselves. The italics are our own. We can
promise them few finer, deeper, and better pleasures than reading, and
detaining their minds over these two books together, filling their hearts
with the fulness of their truth and tenderness. They will see how accurate
as well as how affectionate and "of imagination all compact" Tennyson is,
and how worthy of all that he has said of him, that friend was. The
likeness is drawn _ad vivum_:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
He summons up remembrance of things past.
"The idea of his Life" has been sown a natural body, and has been raised a
spiritual body, but the identity is unhurt; the countenance shines and the
raiment is white and glistering, but it is the same face and form.
The Memoir is by Mr. Hallam. We give it entire, not knowing anywhere a
nobler or more touching record of a father's love and sorrow.
Arthur Henry Hallam was born in Bedford Place,[111] London, on the 1st
of February 1811. Very few years had elapsed before his parents
observed strong indications of his future character, in a peculiar
clearness of perception, a facility of acquiring knowledge, and, above
all, in an undeviating sweetness of disposition, and adherence to his
sense of what was right and becoming. As he advanced to another stage
of childhood, it was rendered still more manifest that he would be
distinguished from ordinary persons, by an increasing thoughtfulness,
and a fondness for a class of books, which in general are so little
intelligible to boys of his age, that they excite in them no kind of
interest.
In the summer of 1818 he spent some months with his parents in Germany
and Switzerland, and became familiar with the French language, which
he had already learned to read with facility. He had gone through the
elements of Latin before this time; but that language having been laid
aside during his tour, it was found upon his return that, a variety of
new scenes having effaced it from his memory, it was necessary to
begin again with the first rudiments. He was nearly eight years old at
this time; and in little more than twelve months he could read Latin
with tolerable facility. In this period his mind was developing itself
more rapidly than before; he now felt a keen relish for dramatic
poetry, and wrote several tragedies, if we may so call them, either in
prose or verse, with a more precocious display of talents than the
Editor remembers to have met with in any other individual. The natural
pride, however, of his parents, did not blind them to the uncertainty
that belongs to all premature efforts of the mind; and they so
carefully avoided everything like a boastful display of blossoms
which, in many cases, have withered away in barren luxuriance, that
the circumstances of these compositions was hardly ever mentioned out
of their own family.