Tennyson and His Friends Part 20

XIII

What use to brood? this life of mingled pains And joys to me, Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains The Mystery.

XIV

Let golden youth bewail the friend, the wife, For ever gone.

He dreams of that long walk thro' desert life Without the one.

XV

The silver year should cease to mourn and sigh-- Not long to wait-- So close are we, dear Mary, you and I To that dim gate.

XVI

Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes Or many or few, He rests content, if his young music wakes A wish in you

XVII

To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm Of sound and smoke, For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm And whispering oak.

TO W. G. WARD

IN MEMORIAM

Farewell, whose living like I shall not find, Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord, My friend, the most unworldly of mankind, Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward, How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind, How loyal in the following of thy Lord!

TO SIR RICHARD JEBB

Fair things are slow to fade away, Bear witness you, that yesterday[43]

From out the Ghost of Pindar in you Roll'd an Olympian; and they say[44]

That here the torpid mummy wheat Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet As that which gilds the glebe of England, Sunn'd with a summer of milder heat.

So may this legend[45] for awhile, If greeted by your cla.s.sic smile, Tho' dead in its Trinacrian Enna, Blossom again on a colder isle.

TO GENERAL HAMLEY

(Prologue of "The Charge of the Heavy Brigade.")

Our birches yellowing and from each The light leaf falling fast, While squirrels from our fiery beech Were bearing off the mast, You came, and look'd and loved the view Long-known and loved by me, Green Suss.e.x fading into blue With one gray glimpse of sea; And, gazing from this height alone, We spoke of what had been Most marvellous in the wars your own Crimean eyes had seen; And now--like old-world inns that take Some warrior for a sign That therewithin a guest may make True cheer with honest wine-- Because you heard the lines I read Nor utter'd word of blame, I dare without your leave to head These rhymings with your name, Who know you but as one of those I fain would meet again, Yet know you, as your England knows That you and all your men Were soldiers to her heart's desire, When, in the vanish'd year, You saw the league-long rampart-fire Flare from Tel-el-Kebir Thro' darkness, and the foe was driven, And Wolseley overthrew Arabi, and the stars in heaven Paled, and the glory grew.

EPITAPH ON LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Thou third great Canning, stand among our best And n.o.blest, now thy long day's work hath ceased, Here silent in our Minster of the West Who wert the voice of England in the East.

EPITAPH ON GENERAL GORDON

IN THE GORDON BOYS' NATIONAL MEMORIAL HOME NEAR WOKING[46]

Warrior of G.o.d, man's friend, and tyrant's foe, Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan, Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know This earth has never borne a n.o.bler man.

G. F. WATTS, R.A.

As when a painter, poring on a face, Divinely, thro' all hindrance, finds the man Behind it, and so paints him that his face, The shape and colour of a mind and life, Lives for his children, ever at its best.

TENNYSON AND BRADLEY (DEAN OF WESTMINSTER)

By MARGARET L. WOODS

Alum Bay, near Farringford, is now greatly changed. A big hotel stands up dwarfing its cliffs, from which the famous layers of various-coloured sand are being continually scooped into bottles, and on many a cottage mantelpiece in the island there is a gla.s.s bottle showing a picture of a lighthouse, or something else curiously wrought in Alum Bay sand. The jagged white Needles still tip the westward point of its crescent, still seeming to salute with greeting or farewell the majestic procession of great ocean-going s.h.i.+ps, and to smile on the frolic wings of yachts, that all the summer long flirt and dance over the blue waters of the Solent, like a flight of white b.u.t.terflies. Formerly the rough track to the Bay led over a lonely bit of common called the Warren, where furze grew, and short brown-ta.s.selled rushes marked the course of a hardly visible stream.

The Warren Farm lies on the landward edge of the Warren, and there on a sunny 6th of August 1855, a third birthday was being solemnized with tea and a tent. It was a blue tent on the top of a haystack, and under it between her baby boy and girl, sat a blue-eyed mother, with the bloom of youth and the freshness of the sea on her beauty. The mother and the two children, lovely, too, with more than the usual loveliness of childhood, were keeping their tiny festival with a gay simplicity, and I do not doubt that on that as on other birthdays, Edith, the birthday queen, was wearing on her golden curls a garland of rosebuds and mignonette. The wheels of a carriage were heard driving up to the farm gate, and in a minute a tall dark man, like a Spanish senor in his long cloak and sombrero, appeared under the haystack. The young woman noted the tall figure, the hat and cloak, the long, dark, clear-cut face, with the beardless and finely modelled mouth and chin, the splendid eyes under the high forehead, and the deep furrows running from nose to chin. She perceived at once it was Alfred Tennyson, whose poems she knew and loved so well. Meantime the Poet, sensitive as all artists must be to human loveliness, looked surely with delight on the pretty picture, the haystack and the blue tent, the young mother and her babes: a picture which was to form as it were a gracious frontispiece to a whole volume of friends.h.i.+p.

He bade her "throw the little maid into his arms," caught the child and asked her how old she was. "Three to-day," answered little Edith proudly.

"Then you and I," said he, "have the same birthday."

The friends.h.i.+p thus preluded was to last until death closed it. The record of it lies here in old diaries and in sheaves of letters, faithfully treasured; a chronicle of some forty years with all the little troubles, the joys and sorrows of the two households, intimately shared. It was a four-cornered friends.h.i.+p, one of husband and wife with husband and wife, but the correspondence pa.s.sed almost entirely between the wives. Men had already for the most part abandoned the practice of letter-writing outside their business and families, but at the little rosewood drawing-room escritoires at which we of the many doc.u.ments are tempted to smile, Victorian women fed the flame of friends.h.i.+p with--here the metaphor becomes a little mixed--a constant flow of ink. Not that the two women who kept up this correspondence were idle. All that Emily Tennyson on her invalid sofa did for her Poet, is it not written in the book of his Biography? Her friend, Marian Bradley, was yet busier than she, having the cares and duties of a mother of a large family, besides those incident to the wife of a man who was successively Head Master of a great school, Head of an Oxford College, and Dean of Westminster.

Granville Bradley was twelve years younger than Alfred Tennyson; an interval in age which permits at once of veneration and of intimacy. It was at the Lus.h.i.+ngtons' house that my father, as an undergraduate of one-and-twenty, first met the young Poet, and became his admirer; but it was not until twelve years later that the admirer became also the friend.

My mother tells in her diary how in that summer of the birthday meeting, the two men roamed the country together, poetizing, botanizing, geologizing. The enthusiasm of science had begun to seize on all thinking humanity, and if botany was considered the only suitable science for ladies, geology had something like a boom among the privileged males. I can see my father now, a slight, active little figure, armed with a hammer and girt with a capacious knapsack, setting forth joyous as a chamois-hunter, for a day's sport among the fossils of the Isle of Wight cliffs. But above all it was the communion of spirit, the play of ideas which interested the two and drew them together. "They talked from 12 noon to 10 P.M., almost incessantly, this day," writes my mother, "Tennyson walking back with him (some three miles) to the Warren farm, still talking."

One pictures the tall, long-cloaked Bard and the vivacious little scholar pacing side by side, inconscient of time and distance, down the s.h.i.+ngly drive of Farringford, through the warm and dusky night of the deep-hedged lanes, overhung with the heavy darkness of August trees, until they came out on the clear pale s.p.a.ces of the open seaward land, and the whisper and scent of the sea. And one would guess this to be a picture of two very young men, absorbed in the first joy of one of the romantic friends.h.i.+ps of youth, did one not know that the Poet was a man of middle age and the scholar in the maturing thirties. But the artists know their way to the Fountain of youth and meet there. Tennyson, the great creative artist, retained all his life the simplicity of a child. My father was no creator, but he, too, was in his way an artist; he was the artist as scholar and teacher. Language and Style were to him things almost as splendid and sacred as they were wont to be to a Renaissance scholar, and sins against them roused the only bad pa.s.sions of an otherwise sweet nature. History to him was not history, it was real life; the rhythm and harmony of poetry were what music is to the ardent music-lover. From childhood to old age he was for ever crooning some favourite fragment of verse. With what delight, then, he found himself crossing the threshold of a great poet's mind; the mind of one who did not, so to speak, keep his friends waiting in the vestibule, but opened to them freely the palace chambers, rich with the treasures of his knowledge, thought, and imagination.

Those pa.s.sages in my mother's diary in which she speaks of the happiness it gave my father and herself to make acquaintance with the Poet, and to find him just what they would have wished him to be, have already appeared in the Biography. Also her description of those evenings in the Farringford drawing-room, so often recurring and through so many years, when he would "talk of what was in his heart," or read aloud some poem, often yet unpublished, while they listened, looking out on the lovely landscape and the glimpse of sea which, "framed in the dark-arched bow-window," seemed, like some beautiful picture, almost to form part of the room.

My father now bought a small estate between Yarmouth and Freshwater, and built a house--Heathfield--upon it, in which to spend his holidays. The Freshwater side of the Isle of Wight was not at that time a fas.h.i.+onable neighbourhood. The lovely, lonely bays on the blue Solent, innocent of lodging-house or bathing-machine, succeeded each other from Yarmouth to the Needles. They were approached over open land, or by little stony chines, deep in gorse and bracken, down which tiny streams trickled, to spread themselves out s.h.i.+ningly on the sands and melt into the sea. I remember my young mother killing a red adder in our chine with a well-aimed stone, as we came up from our morning dip in the waves. There was room for wild creatures and open country and for poetry then on the little island. The islanders, smugglers from generation to generation, had in them more of the wild creature than of poetry. Droll stories used to be told of their inability to appreciate the honour done to Freshwater by the Poet's residence there. But perhaps the days when his "greatness" was measured by the man-servant test[47] were more comfortable days for the Bard than those when his movements were marked and followed through telescopes.

There was a constant coming and going between Heathfield and Farringford, the children of each house being equally at home in the other. I see now the long Farringford drawing-room, full of the green shade of a cedar tree which grew near the great window, and the slight figure of Lady Tennyson rising from the red sofa--it was a red room--and gliding towards my mother with a smile upon her lips. She always wore a soft gray cashmere gown, and it was always made in the same simple fas.h.i.+on; much as dresses were worn in the days of Cruikshank, only that the gathered skirt was longer and less full than the skirts of Cruikshank's ladies. Her silky auburn-brown hair, partly hidden by lace lappets, was untouched with gray, and her complexion kept its rose-leaf delicacy, just as her strong and cultivated intellect kept its alertness, to the last days of her life. No sooner were the greetings over than ten to one the door would open, and the Poet would come slowly, softly, silently, into the room, dressed in an old-fas.h.i.+oned black tail-coat, and fixing my mother with his distant short-sighted gaze.

One day, she being seated with her back to the cedar-green window, he approached her with such extreme deference, and so solemn a courtesy, as made her all amazed; until in a minute, with a flash of amus.e.m.e.nt, both discovered that he had mistaken her for--the Queen. Still more surely one or both of the long-haired, gray-tunicked boys would appear, less silently; and away the children scampered to their endless play about the rambling house and grounds. But even the children's play was informed with the vital interest of the two houses: the story of King Arthur and his knights. The first "Idylls of the King" had appeared, and others were appearing. It was a red-letter evening indeed when Poet and new poem were ready for a reading, either in the little upstairs study, or in the drawing-room, where dessert was always laid after dinner, and he sat at the head of the round table in a high carved chair. Country life was in those days very simple and dinners early, so that even young children appeared with the dessert, and my mother's description of those evenings recalls very clearly some of the earliest of the pictures in memory's picture-book, as well as some later ones. I remember now a story of Tennyson's which tickled my childish sense of humour exceedingly, the point of it lying in a bit of bad French, the badness of which I could appreciate. My father had a vein of dry humour, which being akin to that of the Poet, doubtless a.s.sisted to knit the bonds of friends.h.i.+p, since to find the same thing humorous is almost essential to real intimacy. There was between the two the natural give-and-take of friends.h.i.+p, and to the warm appreciation given as well as received, Emily Tennyson's letters bear constant witness. "Mr. Bradley's intellectual activity, so warmed by the heart, is very good for my Ally," she writes; and again: "I know you would be pleased if you could hear Ally recur to his talks with Mr. Bradley, and one particular talk about the Resurrection and [illegible]. It is difficult to express admiration, so I won't say any more, except G.o.d bless you both."

My father was now in the full stress of his great work at Marlborough, and spent his summer holidays for the most part in Switzerland, but Christmas and Easter still often found us at Freshwater. In 1866 Tennyson's eldest son, Hallam, was sent to school at Marlborough. "I am not sending my son to Marlborough--I am sending him to Bradley," he said in reply to the Queen's question. On another occasion he said: "I am sending him to Marlborough because Bradley is a friend of mine, and Stanley tells me that Marlborough is the best school in England." There followed three visits to Marlborough during the four years longer that my father remained there.

The second one, when Lady Tennyson came with her husband, was brought about by the severe illness of the cherished son, and lasted seven weeks.

At first the anxiety about the boy was too great to admit of pleasure either to them or to my parents, to whom--especially to my mother--Hallam was almost as a son of their own. But later, and during the Poet's other visits, there were walks and drives in Savernake forest, beautiful at all seasons of the year, and over the windy s.p.a.ces of the gray silent downland, where "the chronicles of wasted Time" are written in worn and mysterious hieroglyphs of stone, and fosse, and hillock. During the first visit "The Victim" was written by him in the room called the green dressing-room, looking out on the clipped yews and tall lime-circle of Lady Hertford's old garden. In summer-time he had great pleasure in the peaceful beauty of Marlborough and its landscape, and also in the wealth of flowers with which my mother surrounded herself in her house and garden; for she was a great gardener before it became fas.h.i.+onable to be so. In the drawing-room at the Lodge, masters and their wives--then all young--and Sixth Form boys gathered around the Poet. At that time he had for years been living a life apart from the crowd, and it must have been an effort to him to project himself into this young and wholly strange school society. But he did it gallantly and seemed happy among the young people. There were science evenings and poetry evenings. That is, there were evenings when masters interested in science exhibited the wonders of the microscope, and evenings when Tennyson read aloud his own poetry or Hood's comic verses. I remember well being allowed to stay up to hear him read "Guinevere" to the Upper Sixth Form. He had a great deep voice like the booming of waves in a sea-cave, and although the situation in the poem was not one to appeal to a child, yet his reading of the farewell of Arthur to Guinevere affected me so much that I crawled into a corner and wept two pocket-handkerchiefs full of tears.