Tennyson and His Friends Part 15

(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 amus.e.m.e.nt to them. What a Life of Wonder--every object new. This morning he (his own little boy) wors.h.i.+pp'd the Bed-post when a gleam of suns.h.i.+ne 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 s.p.a.ce of perfect silence, a long roll of Thunder--from some wave rus.h.i.+ng 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."

_apropos_ 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 Cla.s.sics--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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.ble, 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.