Tennyson and His Friends Part 25

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 cla.s.sics, "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 cla.s.sical architecture a little before going out, and he said that he thought, after all, Gothic architecture was finer than cla.s.sic. "It is like blank verse," he said; "it will suit the humblest cottage and the grandest cathedral. It has more mystery than the cla.s.sic." He thought many of our cathedrals spoiled by their vile gla.s.s. 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 subst.i.tuted, 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; pa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 Hertfords.h.i.+re, 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 Hertfords.h.i.+re. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARTHUR TENNYSON.]

Tennyson's friends.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+eld, 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 a.s.sociations and pa.s.sions 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 d.y.k.e 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,