Tennyson and His Friends Part 34

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 cla.s.sing 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 sh.e.l.l was not the kernel, but the kernel ripened all the better in the shelter of the sh.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l.

In his view, as it seemed to me, there were two att.i.tudes 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 att.i.tudes of mind were poles asunder; they must never be confused together.

I may be allowed to ill.u.s.trate 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 Lords.h.i.+p'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 G.o.d; but it is harder not to believe. I believe in G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d?"

"Certainly," he replied. I said, "Is not that what Christ said and was? He was in man the highest witness of G.o.d to Man," and I quoted the recorded words, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." He a.s.sented, but said that there were, of course, difficulties in the idea of a Trinity--the Three. "But mind," he said, "Son of G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+pwreck, 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 relations.h.i.+p between G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.[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 sh.o.r.e, 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 n.o.bleness 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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. Bis...o...b.. 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 companions.h.i.+p" and made of it "such a friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.n.u.script of "In Memoriam."[79] He had often asked him to give him a ma.n.u.script 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 gla.s.s."

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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.u.t.terfly'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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 a.s.sociated with its owner as Farringford, and received the sorrowful consecration of having been the scene of his pa.s.sing 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!