TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
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Barraud, photographer Emery Walker, Ph.sc.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(in his 80^th year)

TENNYSON AND HIS
FRIENDS

EDITED
BY
HALLAM, LORD TENNYSON

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1911

Dedicated
TO
THE FRIENDS OF TENNYSON
BY
HIS SON

PREFACE

To those who have contributed to this volume their memories of my father, criticisms of his work, or records of his friends, I owe a deep debt of gratitude. Three of the writers, Henry Butcher, Sir Alfred Lyall, and Graham Dakyns, have lately, to my great loss, passed away—into that fuller “light of friendship”—

TENNYSON.

[The following chapters about my father are arranged, as far as possible, according to the sequence of his life. Further reminiscences by the Duke of Argyll, Gladstone, Jowett, Lecky, Locker-Lampson, Palgrave, Lord Selborne, Tyndall, Aubrey de Vere, and other friends, will be found in Tennyson, a Memoir.]

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS

JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER

(Dedication of “The Death of Œnone” to Emily, Lady Tennyson)

Emery Walker, Ph.sc.

Emily Lady Tennyson
from a drawing by G. F. Watts, R.A.

RECOLLECTIONS OF MY EARLY LIFE

By Emily, Lady Tennyson

Written for her son in 1896

You ask me to tell you something of my life before marriage at Horncastle in Lincolnshire. It would be hard indeed not to do anything you ask of me if within my power. To say the truth, this particular thing you want is somewhat painful. The first thing I remember of my father[1] is his looking at me with sad eyes after my mother’s[2] death. Her I recollect, passing the window in a velvet pelisse, and then in a white shawl on the sofa, and then crowned with roses—beautiful in death. I recollect, too, being carried to her funeral; but I asked what they were doing, and in all this had no idea of death.

My life before marriage was in many ways sad: in one, however, unspeakably happy. No one could have had a better father, or been happier with her two sisters, Anne and Louisa. Although, if we were too merry and noisy in the mornings, we were summoned by my Aunt Betsy (who lived with us) all three into her room, to hold out our small hands for stripes from a certain little riding-whip; or if, later in the day, our needlework was not well done we had our fingers pricked with a needle, or if the lessons were not finished, we had fools’ caps put on our heads, and were banished to a corner of the room. My aunt’s nature was by no means cruel; she was, on the whole, kind and dutiful to us, yet no doubt with effort on her part, for she had no instinctive love of children.

Among our neighbours we had as friends the Tennysons, the Rawnsleys, the Bellinghams, and the Massingberds. The death of my cousin, Mr. Cracroft, was among my early tragedies. He had been on public business at Lincoln: and on his return to Horncastle, was seized at our house with Asiatic cholera, a solitary case, which proved fatal. Ourselves and his daughters heard of it in a strange way. We were in a tent at a sheep-shearing, the great rustic festival of that day. A village boy came into our tent, and swarmed up the pole, saying to us, “I know something; your father is dead.” We hurried home, and we, three sisters, were put by my aunt (to keep us quiet) to the hitherto-unwonted task of stoning raisins. This made me so indignant that I threw my raisins over the edge of the bowl, and forthwith my aunt caught me up, and—so rough was the treatment of children then—banged my head against the door of our old wainscoted rooms, until I called out for my father, crying aloud, “Murder”; when he rushed in and saved me.

My next memory of my father is his giving me Latin lessons; and at this time I somehow came across a copy of Cymbeline, which I read with great delight. Then we had our first riding-lessons. I well recall my dislike of riding, when my pony was fastened to a circus stake, which I had to go round and round. Unfortunately, much as my father wished it, I never became a good horsewoman. He himself was so good a rider, when all the gentlemen of the county were volunteers, that he could ride horses which no one else could ride—so my grandmother would tell me with pride—adding, “Your father and his brother (both six foot three) were the handsomest men among them all.” At that time he kept guard with his fellow-volunteers over the French prisoners, who, he said, were always cheerful and always singing their patriotic songs.

But to return to my sisters and myself. For exercise we generally took long walks in the country, and I remember that when staying at my father’s house in Berkshire[3] we often used to wander up to a tower among our woods where a gaunt old lady lived, called Black Jane, who told our fortunes. We had our favourite theatricals, too, like other children. Our dramatic performances were frequent, and our plays were, some of them, drawn from Miss Edgeworth’s tales. I was always fond of music, and used to sing duets with my soldier cousin, Richard Sellwood.

At eight years old I was sent, with my sisters, to some ladies for daily lessons, and later to schools in Brighton and London, for my father disliked having a governess in the house. So, much as he objected to young girls being sent from home, school in our case seemed the lesser evil. My sisters liked school; to me it was dreadful. As soon as I reached the Brighton seminary, I remember that for weeks I appeared to be in a horrible dream, and the voices of the mistresses and the girls around me seemed to be all thin, like voices from the grave. I could not be happy away from my father, who was my idol, though after a while I grew more accustomed to the strange life. My father would never let us go the long, cold journey at Christmas time from Brighton to Horncastle, but came up to town for the vacation, and took us for treats to the National Gallery, and other places of interest. Great was the joy, when the summer holidays arrived, and after travelling by coach through the day and night, we three sisters saw Whittlesea-mere gleaming under the sunrise. It seemed as if we were within sight of home.

When I was eighteen, my Aunt Betsy left us to live by herself alone. We spent rather recluse lives, but we were perfectly happy, my father reading to us every evening from about half-past eight to ten, the hour at which we had family prayers. Most delightful were the readings; for instance, all of Gibbon that could be read to us, Macaulay’s Essays, Sir Walter Scott’s novels. For my private reading he gave me Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso, Molière, Racine, Corneille. Later I read Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter; and for English—Pearson, Paley’s Translation of the Early Fathers, Coleridge’s works, Wordsworth, and of course Milton and Shakespeare. We had walks and drives and music and needlework. Now and again we dined in the neighbourhood, and some of the neighbours dined with us; and once a year my father asked all the legal luminaries of Horncastle to dinner with him.

Before my sister Louy married your Uncle Charles (Tennyson-Turner) in 1836, my cousin, Catherine Franklin, daughter of Sir Willingham Franklin, took up her abode with us, and we had several dances at our house. Two fancy-dress dances I well remember. Louy and I disliked visiting in London and in country-houses, and so we always refused, and sent Anne in our stead. My first ball, I thought an opening of the great portals of the world, and I looked forward to it almost with awe. It is rather curious that at one of my very few balls, Mr. Musters (Jack Musters his intimates called him), who married Byron’s Mary Chaworth, should have asked for, and obtained, an introduction to me.

In 1842 came Catherine’s marriage to our true friend, Drummond Rawnsley, the parson of the Rawnsley family; and then my sister Anne married Charles Weld. After this my father and I lived together alone. The only change we had from our routine life was a journey, one summer, to Tours, with Anne and Charles Weld, and his brother Isaac Weld, the accomplished owner of Ravenswell, near Bray, in Ireland.

At your father’s home, Somersby, we used to have evenings of music and singing. Your Aunt Mary played on the harp as her father used to do. She was a splendid-looking girl, and would have made a beautiful picture. Then your Aunt Emily (beloved of Arthur Hallam) had wonderful eyes—depths on depths they seemed to have—and a fine profile. “Testa Romana” an old Italian said of her. She had more of the colouring of the South, inherited, perhaps, from a member of Madame de Maintenon’s family who married one of the Tennysons. Your father had also the same kind of colouring. All, brothers and sisters, were fair to see. Your father was kingly, masses of fine, wavy hair, very dark, with a pervading shade of gold, and long, as it was then worn. His manner was kind, simple, and dignified, with plenty of sportiveness flashing out from time to time. During my ten years’ separation from him the doctors believed I was going into a consumption, and the Lincolnshire climate was pronounced to be too cold for me; and we moved to London, to look for a home in the south of England. We found one at last at Hale near Farnham, which was called by your father “my paradise.” The recollection of this delightful country made me persuade your father eventually to build a house near Haslemere. We were married on June 13, 1850, at Shiplake on the Thames.

TENNYSON AND LINCOLNSHIRE

By Willingham Rawnsley

I

Tennyson’s Country

Lincolnshire is a big county, measuring seventy-five miles by forty-five, but it is perhaps the least well known of all the counties of England. The traveller by the Great Northern main line passes through but a small portion of its south-western fringe near Grantham; and if he goes along the eastern side from Peterborough to Grimsby or Hull, he gains no insight into the picturesque parts of the county, for the line takes him over the rich flat fenlands with their black vegetable mould devoid of any kind of stone or pebble, and intersected by those innumerable dykes or drains varying from 8 to 80 feet across, which give the southern division of Lincolnshire an aspect in harmony with its Batavian name “the parts of Holland.”

The Queen of this flat fertile plain is Boston, with her wonderful church-tower and lantern 280 feet high, a marvel of symmetry when you are near it, and visible for more than twenty miles in all directions. Owing to its slender height it seems, from a distance, to stand up like a tall thick mast or tree-trunk, and is hence known to all the countryside as “Boston stump.”

At this town, the East Lincolnshire line divides: one section goes to the left to Lincoln; the other, following the bend of the coast at about seven miles’ distance from the sea, turns when opposite Skegness and runs, at right angles to its former course, to Louth,—Louth whose beautiful church spire was painted by Turner in his picture of “The Horse Fair.”

The more recent Louth-to-Lincoln line completes the fourth side of a square having Boston, Burgh, Louth, and Lincoln for its corners, which contains the fairest portion of the Lincolnshire wolds, and within this square is Somersby, Tennyson’s birthplace and early home. It is a tiny village surrounded by low green hills; and close at hand, here nestling in a leafy hollow, and there standing boldly on the “ridgèd wold,” are some half a dozen churches built of the local “greensand” rock, from whose towers the Poet in his boyhood heard:

The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist—

the mist which lay athwart those “long gray fields at night,” and marked the course of the beloved Somersby brook.

If we go past the little gray church with its perfect specimen of a pre-Reformation cross hard by the porch, and past the modest house almost opposite, which was for over thirty years the home of the Tennysons, we shall come at once to the point where the road dips to a little wood through which runs the rivulet so lovingly described by the Poet when he was leaving the home of his youth:

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

and again:

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;
Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove.

Northward, beyond the stream, the white road climbs the wold above Tetford, and disappears from sight. These wolds are chalk; the greensand ridge being all to the south of the valley, except just at Somersby and Bag-Enderby, where the sandrock crops up by the roadside, and in the little wood by the brook.

This small deep channelled brook with sandy bottom—over which one may on any bright day see, as described in “Enid,”

a shoal
Of darting fish, that on a summer morn...
Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand,
But if a man who stands upon the brink
But lift a shining hand against the sun,
There is not left the twinkle of a fin
Betwixt the cressy islets white with flower—

was very dear to Tennyson. When in his “Ode to Memory” he bids Memory

Come from the woods which belt the gray hillside,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father’s door,

he adds:

And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn
In every elbow and turn,
The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland,
O! hither lead thy feet!

If we follow this

pastoral rivulet that swerves
To left and right thro’ meadowy curves,
That feed the mothers of the flock,

we, too, shall hear

the livelong bleat
Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds
Upon the ridgèd wolds.

And shall see the cattle in the rich grass land, and mark on the right the green-gray tower of Spilsby, where so many of the Franklin family lived and died, the family of whom his future bride was sprung.

Still keeping by the brook, we shall see, past the tower of Bag-Enderby which adjoins Somersby, “The gray hill side” rising up behind the Old Hall of Harrington, and

The Quarry trenched along the hill
And haunted by the wrangling daw,

above which runs the chalky “ramper” or turnpike-road which leads along the eastern ridge of the wold to Alford, whence you proceed across the level Marsh to the sea at Mablethorpe.

The Marsh in Lincolnshire is a word of peculiar significance. The whole country is either fen, wold, or marsh. The wolds, starting from Keal and Alford, run in two ridges on either side of the Somersby Valley, one going north to Louth and onwards, and one west by Spilsby and Horncastle to Lincoln. Here it joins the great spine-bone of the county on which, straight as an arrow for many a mile northwards, runs the Roman Ermine Street; and but for the Somersby brook these two ridges from Louth and Lincoln would unite at Spilsby, whence the greensand formation, which begins at Raithby, sends out two spurs, one eastwards, ending abruptly at Halton, while the other pushes a couple of miles farther south, until at Keal the road drops suddenly into the level fen, giving a view—east, south, and west—of wonderful extent and colour, ending to the east with the sea, and to the south with the tall pillar of Boston Church standing up far above the horizon. This flat land is the fen; all rich cornland and all well drained, but with few habitations, and with absolutely no hill or even rise in the ground until, passing Croyland or Crowland Abbey, which once dominated a veritable land of fens only traversable by boats, you come, on the farther side of Peterborough, to the great North Road. Such views as this from Keal, and the similar one from Lincoln Minster, which looks out far to the south-west over a similar large tract of fen, are not to be surpassed in all the land.

But the Poet’s steps from Somersby would not as a rule go westwards. The coast would oftener be his aim; and leaving Spilsby to the right, and the old twice-plague-stricken village of Partney, where the Somersby rivulet becomes a river, he would pass from “the high field on the bushless pike” to Miles-cross-hill, whence the panorama unfolds which he has depicted in Canto XI. of “In Memoriam”:

Calm and still light on yon great plain,
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main.

Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to

Some lowly cottage whence we see
Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky.

This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called the Marsh, a strip between five and eight miles wide, running parallel with the coast from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from

the sandbuilt ridge
Of heaped hills that mound the sea.

This strip of land is not marsh in the ordinary sense of the word, but a belt of the richest grass land, all level and with no visible fences, each field being surrounded by a broad dyke or ditch with deep water, hidden in summer by the tall feathery plumes of the “whispering reeds.” Across this belt the seawind sweeps for ever. The Poet may allude to this when, in his early poem, “Sir Galahad,” he writes:

But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields;

and “the hard grey weather” sung by Kingsley breeds a race of hardy gray-eyed men with long noses, the manifest descendants of the Danes who peopled all that coast, and gave names to most of the villages there, nine-tenths of which end in “by.”

This rich pasture-land runs right up to the sand-dunes,—Nature’s own fortification made by the winds and waves which is just outside the Dutch and Roman embankments, and serves better than all the works of man to keep out the waters of the North Sea from the low-lying levels of the Marsh and Fen.

The lines in the “Lotos-Eaters”:

They sat them down upon the yellow sand
Between the sun and moon upon the shore,

describes what the Poet might at any time of full moon have seen from that “sand-built ridge” with the red sun setting over the wide marsh, and the full moon rising out of the eastern sea; and “The wide winged sunset of the misty marsh” recalls one of the most noticeable features of that particular locality, where, across the limitless windy plain, the sun would set in regal splendour; and when “cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn” his rising over the sea would be equally magnificent in colour.

Having crossed the “Marsh” by a raised road with deep wide dykes on either side, and no vestige of hedge or tree in sight, except where a row of black poplars or aspens form a screen from the searching wind round a group of the plainest of farm buildings, red brick with roofing of black glazed pan-tiles, you come to the once tiny village of Mablethorpe, sheltering right under the sea-bank, the wind-blown sands of which are held together by the penetrating roots of the tussocks of long, coarse, sharp-edged grass, and the prickly bushes of sea buckthorn, gray-leaved and orange-berried.

You top the sand-ridge, and below, to right and left, far as eye can see, stretch the flat, brown sands. Across these the tide, which at the full of the moon comes right up to the barrier, goes out for three-quarters of a mile; of this the latter half is left by the shallow wavelets all ribbed, as you see it on the ripple-marked stone of the Horsham quarries, and shining with the bright sea-water which reflects the low rays of the sun; while far off, so far that they seem to be mere toys, the shrimper slowly drives his small horse and cart, to the tail of which is attached the primitive purse net, the other end of it being towed by the patient, long-haired donkey, ridden by a boy whose bare feet dangle in the shallow wavelets. Farther to the south the tide ebbs quite out of sight. This is at “Gibraltar Point,” near Wainfleet Haven, where Somersby brook at length finds the sea, a place very familiar to the Poet in his youth. The skin of mud on the sands makes them shine like burnished copper in the level rays of the setting sun, which here have no sandbank to intercept them, but at other times it is a scene of dreary desolation, such as is aptly described in “The Passing of Arthur”:

a coast
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

It was near this part of the shore that, as a young man, he often walked, rolling out his lines aloud or murmuring them to himself, a habit which was also that of Wordsworth, and led in each case to the peasants supposing the Poet to be “craäzed,” and caused the Somersby cook to wonder “what Mr. Awlfred was always a-praying for,” and caused also the fisherman, whom he met on the sands once at 4 A.M. as he was walking without hat or coat, and to whom he bid good-morning, to reply, “Thou poor fool, thou doesn’t knaw whether it be night or daä.”

But at Mablethorpe the sea does not go out nearly so far, and at high tide it comes right up to the bank with splendid menacing waves, the memory of which furnished him, five and thirty years after he had left Lincolnshire for ever, with the famous simile in “The Last Tournament”:

as the crest of some slow-arching wave,
Heard in dead night along that table shore,
Drops flat, and after the great waters break
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing.

This accurately describes the flat Lincolnshire coast with its “interminable rollers” breaking on the endless sands, than which waves the Poet always said that he had never anywhere seen grander, and the clap of the wave as it fell on the hard sand could be heard across that flat country for miles. Doubtless this is what prompted the lines in “Locksley Hall”:

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

“We hear in this,” says the “Lincolnshire Rector,”[4] writing in Macmillan’s Magazine of December 1873, “the mighty sound of the breakers as they fling themselves at full tide with long-gathered force upon the slope sands of Skegness or Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, nowhere is ocean grander in a storm; nowhere is the thunder of the sea louder, nor its waves higher, nor the spread of their waters on the beach wider.”

It is not only of the breakers that the Poet has given us pictures. Along these sands it was his wont, no doubt, as it has often been that of the writer,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray,

and it is still Skegness and Mablethorpe which may have furnished him with his simile in “The Dream of Fair Women”:

So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land
Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,
Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,
Torn from the fringe of spray.

Walking along the shore as the tide goes out, you come constantly on creeks and pools left by the receding waves,

A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.[5]

or little dimpled hollows of brine, formed by the wind-swept water washing round some shell or stone:

As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long
A little bitter pool about a stone
On the bare coast.[6]

Many characteristics of Lincolnshire scenery and of Somersby in particular are introduced in “In Memoriam.”

In Canto LXXXIX. the poet speaks of the hills which shut in the Somersby Valley on the north:

Nor less it pleased in lustier moods
Beyond the bounding hill to stray.

In XCV. he speaks of the knolls, elsewhere described as “The hoary knolls of ash and haw,” where the cattle lie on a summer night:

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d
The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:

and in Canto C. he calls to mind:

The sheepwalk up the windy wold,

and many other features seen in his walks with Arthur Hallam at Somersby.

In “Mariana” we have:

From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn,
About the lonely moated grange.

But no picture is more complete and accurate and remarkable than that of a wet day in the Marsh and on the sands of Mablethorpe:

Here often when a child I lay reclined:
I took delight in this fair strand and free:
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships all seem’d to be.
And here again I come, and only find
The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,
Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

From what we have said it will be clear to the reader that while it is the fen land only that the railway traveller sees, it is the Marsh and the Wolds—and particularly in Lord Tennyson’s mind the Wolds—that make the characteristic charm of the county, a charm of which so many illustrations are to be found throughout his poems. Certainly in her wide extended views, in the open wolds with the villages and their gray church towers nestling in the sheltered nooks at the wold foot, and also (to quote again from the “Lincolnshire Rector”) “in her glorious parish churches and gigantic steeples, Lincolnshire has charms and beauties of her own. And as to fostering genius, has she not proved herself to be the ‘meet nurse of a poetic child’? for here, be it remembered, here in the heart of the land, in Mid-Lincolnshire, Alfred Tennyson was born, here he spent all his earliest and freshest days; here he first felt the divine afflatus, and found fit material for his muse:

The Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the Camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.”

II

The Somersby Friends

It is no wonder that the Tennysons loved Somersby. They were a large family, and here they grew up together, making their own world and growing ever more fond of the place for its associations. “How often have I longed to be with you at Somersby!” writes Alfred Tennyson’s sister, Mary,[7] thirteen years after leaving the old home. “How delightful that name sounds to me! Visions of sweet past days rise up before my eyes, when life itself was new,

And the heart promised what the fancy drew.”

Here, when childhood’s happy days were over, the Tennyson girls rejoiced in the society of their brothers’ Cambridge friends, and, though the village was so remote that they only got a post two or three times a week,[8] here they not only drank in contentedly the beauty of the country, but also passed delightful days with talk and books, with music and poetry, and dance and song, when, on the lawn at Somersby, one of the sisters

brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon.

Here, as Arthur Hallam said, “Alfred’s mind was moulded in silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of Nature.”

I have said that they made their own world; and they were well able to do it, for they were a very remarkable family. The Doctor was a very tall, dark man, very strict with his boys, to whom he was schoolmaster as well as parent. He was a scholar, and unusually well read, and possessed a good library. Clever, too, he was with his hands, and carved the stone chimney-piece in the dining-room, which his man Horlins built under his direction. He and his wife were a great contrast, for she was very small and gentle and highly sensitive.

Edward FitzGerald speaks of her as “one of the most innocent and tender-hearted ladies I ever saw”; and the Poet depicts her in “Isabel,” where he speaks of her gentle voice, her keen intellect and her

Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign
The summer calm of golden charity.

Mary was the letter-writer of the family, and a very clever woman, and her letters show that she knew her Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge as well as her brother’s poems.

They were a united family, but Charles and Alfred were nearest to her in age. She writes to one of her great friends: “O my beloved, what creatures men are! my brothers are the exception to this general rule.” Accordingly, of Charles she writes: “If ever there was a sweet delightful character it is that dear Charley,” and of Alfred: “A. is one of the noblest of his kind. You know my opinion of men in general is much like your own; they are not like us, they are naturally more selfish and not so affectionate.” She adds:

Alfred is universally beloved by all his friends, and was long so before he came to any fame....

We look upon him as the stay of the family; you know it is to him we go when anything is to be done. Something lately occurred here which was painful; we wrote to Alfred and he came immediately, after, I am told, not speaking three days scarcely to any one from distress of mind, and that not for himself, mind, but for others. Did this look like selfishness?

After leaving Somersby she felt the loss of these brothers sorely.

Alfred’s devotion to his mother was always perfect. In October 1850 Mary writes from Cheltenham:

Yesterday, Mamma, I, and Fanny went to look for houses, as Alfred has written to say that he should like to live by his Mother or in the same house with us, if we could get one large enough, and he would share the rent, which would be a great deal better. He wishes us to take a house in the neighbourhood of London, if we can give up ours, with him, or to take a small house for him and Emily[9] on the outskirts of Cheltenham till we can move; so what will be done I know not, but this I know that Alfred must come here and choose for himself, so we have written to him to come immediately, and we are daily expecting him.

But though life at Cheltenham when the brothers were all away was dull for Mary, it had not been so at Somersby; for there they had home interests sufficient to keep them always occupied, and they were not without neighbours. Ormsby was close at hand, to the north, where lived as Rector, Frank Massingberd, afterwards Chancellor of Lincoln, a man of cultivation and old-world courtesy. His wife Fanny was one of the charming Miss Barings of Harrington, which was but a couple of miles off to the east. Her sister Rosa was that “sole rose of beauty, loveliness complete,” to whom the Poet wrote such charming little birthday verses; and sixty-five years afterwards Rosa, then Mrs. Duncombe Shafto, still spoke with enthusiasm of those happy days. Mrs. Baring had married for her second husband, Admiral Eden, a man of great conversational powers, and with a very large circle of interesting friends. He took the old Hall of Harrington, with its fine brick front, from the Cracrofts, who moved to Hackthorn near Lincoln, and thus the families at Harrington and Somersby saw a great deal of one another.

There were two Eden daughters, the strikingly handsome Dulcibella and her sister, who looked after the house and its guests. Hence their nicknames of “Dulce” and “Utile.”

A mile or two beyond Harrington was Langton, where Dr. Johnson came to visit his friend Bennet Langton, who died only seven years before Dr. Tennyson came to Somersby. But, though the Langtons were friends of the Doctor’s, this was not a house the young people much frequented. Mary, having come back to the old neighbourhood, writes from Scremby: “I am going to Langton to-morrow to spend a few days with the Langtons, don’t you pity me? I hope I shall get something more out of Mrs. Langton than Indeed, Yes, No!”

Adjoining Langton the Tennysons had friends in the Swans of Saucethorpe, and a little farther eastwards was Partney, where George Maddison and his mother lived. He was a hero, of whom tales were told of many courageous deeds, such as his going single-handed and taking a desperate criminal who, being armed, had barricaded himself in an old building and set all the police at defiance. It was a question whether people most admired the courage of the man or the beauty of his charming wife, Fanny, one of the three good-looking daughters of Sir Alan Bellingham, who all found husbands in that neighbourhood. In the Lincolnshire poem, “The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts,” the Poet has immortalized their name:

Goä to the laäne at the back, and loök thruf Maddison’s gaäte!

From Partney the hill rises to Dalby, where lived John Bourne, whose wife was an aunt of the young Tennysons, and here they would meet the handsome Miss Bournes of Alford; one, Margaret, was dark, the other was Alice, a beautiful fair girl. They married brothers, Marcus and John Huish. Mrs. John Bourne was the Doctor’s sister Mary, and the young Tennysons would have been oftener at Dalby had it been their Aunt Elizabeth Russell[10] who lived there, of whom they always spoke in terms of the strongest affection.

The old house at Dalby was burnt down in 1841. About this Mr. Marcus Huish tells me that his mother wrote in a diary at the time:

Jan. 5, 1841.—On this day Dalby House, the seat of the Bournes, and round whose simple Church, standing embosomed in trees, my family, including my dear sister Mary Hannah, lie buried, was burnt to the ground;

and on the 7th Mrs. Huish wrote:

I have this morning received intelligence that the dear House at Dalby was on Tuesday night burnt down, and is now a wreck. I feel very deeply this disastrous circumstance, endeared as it was to me by ties of time and association. Mr. Tennyson has written to me as follows on this catastrophe.

The letter was a long one, two pages being left for it in the diary, but unfortunately it was never copied in.

The villages here are very close together, and going from Partney, two miles eastward, you come to Skendleby, where Sir Edward Brackenbury lived, whose elder brother Sir John was Consul at Cadiz, and used to send over some good pictures and some strong sherry, known by the diners-out as “the Consul’s sherry.” The Rector of the next village of Scremby was also a Brackenbury, and here Mary Tennyson most loved to visit. Mrs. Brackenbury, whom she always calls “Gloriana,” was adored by all who knew her. Mary says, “She is so sweet a character, and she has always been so kind and so anxious for our family ... I look upon her as already a saint.” Two of the Rectors of Halton had also been Brackenburys—a father and son in succession, and they were followed by two generations of Rawnsleys—Thomas Hardwicke and his son Drummond.

Adjoining Scremby is Candlesby, where Tennyson’s genial friend, John Alington, who had married another of the beautiful Miss Bellinghams, was Rector; and within half a mile is Gunby, the delightful old home of the Massingberds. In Dr. Tennyson’s time Peregrine Langton, who had married the heiress of the Massingberds and taken her name, was living there.

It was from Gunby that Algernon Massingberd disappeared, going to America and never being heard of again, which gave rise to a romance in “Novel” form, that came out many years later called The Lost Sir Massingberd. Going on eastward still, by Boothby, where Dr. Tennyson’s friends the Walls family lived, in a house to which you drove up across the grass pasture, the sheep grazing right up to the front door, a thing still common in the Lincolnshire Marsh, you come to Burgh, with its magnificent Church tower and old carved woodwork. Here was the house of Sir George Crawford, and here from the edge of the high ground on which the Church stands you plunge down on to the level Marsh across which, at five miles’ distance, is Skegness, at that time only a handful of fishermen’s cottages, with “Hildred’s Hotel,” one good house occupied by a large tenant farmer, and a reed-thatched house right on the old Roman sea bank, built by Miss Walls, only one room thick, so that from the same room she could see both the sunrise and the sunset. Here all the neighbourhood at different times would meet, and enjoy the wide prospect of sea and Marsh and the broad sands and the splendid air. When the tide was out the only thing to be seen, as far as eye could reach, were the two or three fishermen, like specks on the edge of the sea, and the only sounds were the piping of the various sea-birds, stints, curlews, and the like, as they flew along the creeks or over the gray sand-dunes. Mablethorpe was nearer to Somersby, but had no house of any size at which, as here, the dwellers on the wold knew that they were always welcome.

But we have other houses to visit, so let us return by Burgh and Bratoft, where above the chancel arch of the ugly brick Church is a remarkable picture of the Spanish Armada, represented as a huge red dragon, with the ships of Effingham’s fleet painted in the corner of the picture.

Passing Bratoft, the next thing we come to is the Somersby brook, which is here “the Halton River,” and on the greensand ridge, overlooking the fen as far as “Boston Stump,” stands the fine Church of Halton Holgate. In this Church, as at Harrington, Alfred as a boy must have seen the old stone effigy of a Crusader as described in “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”

with his feet upon the hound,
Cross’d! for once he sailed the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride.

The road ascends the “hollow way” cut through the greensand, and a timber footbridge is flung across it leading from the Church to the Rectory. Dr. Tennyson could tell the story of how his old friend T. H. Rawnsley, the Rector, and Mr. Eden, brother of the Admiral, being in London, looked in at the great Globe in Leicester Square and heard a man lecturing on Geology. They listened till they heard “This Greensand formation here disappears” (he was speaking of Sussex) “and crops up again in an obscure little village called Halton Holgate in Lincolnshire.” “Come along, Eden!” said the Rector; “this is a very stupid fellow.”

Halton was the house, and Mr. and Mrs. Rawnsley the people, whom Dr. Tennyson most loved to visit. She had been previously known to him as the beautiful Miss Walls of Boothby. The Rector was the most genial and agreeable of men, and her charm of look and manner made his wife a universal favourite.

Here are two characteristic letters from Dr. Tennyson to Mr. Rawnsley:

Tuesday 28th, 1826.

Dear Rawnsley—In your not having come to see me for so many months, when you have little or nothing to do but warm your shins over the fire while I, unfortunately, am frozen or rather suffocated with Greek and Latin, I consider myself as not only slighted but spifflicated. You deserve that I should take no notice of your letter whatever, but I will comply with your invitation partly to be introduced to the agreeable and clever lady, but more especially to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Rawnsley, whom, you may rest assured, I value considerably more than I do you. Mrs. T. is obliged by your invitation, but the weather is too damp and hazy, Mr. Noah,—so I remain your patriarchship’s neglected servant,

G. C. Tennyson.

This letter was addressed to the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, Halton Parsonage. The next was addressed to Halton Palace, and runs thus:

Somersby, Monday.

Dear Rawnsley—We three shall have great pleasure in dining with you to-morrow. We hope, also, that Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and yourselves will favour us with their and your company to dinner during their stay. I like them very much, and shall be very happy to know more of them.—Very truly yours,

G. C. Tennyson.

P.S.—How the devil do you expect that people are to get up at seven o’clock in the morning to answer your notes? However, I have not kept your Ganymede waiting.

The friendship between the families, which was further cemented when the Rector’s son Drummond married Kate Franklin, whose cousin, Emily Sellwood, afterwards became the Poet’s wife, has been maintained for three generations. Alfred shared his father’s opinion of Halton, and often wrote both to the Rector and his wife. In one letter to her, after pleading a low state of health and spirits as his reason for not joining her party at Halton, he says: “At the same time, believe me it is not without considerable uneasiness that I absent myself from a house where I visit with greater pleasure than at any other in the country, if indeed I may be said to visit any other.”

After leaving Somersby, he wrote on Jan. 28, 1838, from High Beech, Epping Forest:

My dear Mrs. Rawnsley—I have long been intending to write to you, for I think of you a great deal, and if I had not a kind of antipathy against taking pen in hand I would write to you oftener; but I am nearly as bad in this way as Werner, who kept an express (horse and man) from his sister at an inn for two months before he could prevail upon himself to write an answer to her, and her letter to him was, nevertheless, on family business of the last importance. But my chief motive in writing to you now is the hope that I may prevail upon you to come and see us as soon as you can. I understood from some of my sisters that Mr. Rawnsley was coming in February to visit his friend Sir Gilbert. Now I trust that you and Sophy will come with him—of course he would not pass without calling, whether alone or not. I was very sorry not to have seen Drummond. I wish he would have dropt me a line a few days before, that I might have stayed at home and been cheered with the sight of a Lincolnshire face; for I must say of Lincolnshire, as Cowper said of England,

With all thy faults I love thee still.

You hope our change of residence is for the better. The only advantage in it is that one gets up to London oftener. The people are sufficiently hospitable, but it is not in a good old-fashioned way, so as to do one’s feelings any good. Large set dinners with stores of venison and champagne are very good things of their kind, but one wants something more; and Mrs. Arabin seems to me the only person about who speaks and acts as an honest and true nature dictates: all else is artificial, frozen, cold, and lifeless.

Now that I have said a good word for Lincolnshire and a bad one for Essex, I hope I have wrought upon your feelings, and that you will come and see us with Mr. Rawnsley. Pray do. You could come at the same time with Miss Walls when she pays her visit to the Arabins, and so have all the inside of the mail to yourselves; for though you were very heroic last summer on the high places of the diligence, I presume that this weather is sufficient to cool any courage down to zero.—Believe me, with love from all to all, always yours,

A. Tennyson.

Beech Hill, High Beech, Loughton, Essex.

To this letter Mrs. Tennyson, the Poet’s mother, adds a postscript, though she complains that Alfred has scarcely left her room to do so. The letter is dated in her hand.

The Halton family consisted of Edward, Drummond, and Sophy. The latter, with Rosa Baring, were two of Alfred’s favourite partners at the Spilsby and Horncastle balls. Sophy Rawnsley became Mrs. Ed. Elmhirst; she often talked of the old Halton and Somersby days. “He was,” she said, “so interesting, because he was so unlike other young men; and his unconventionality of manner and dress had a charm which made him more acceptable than the dapper young gentleman of the ordinary type at ball or supper party. He was a splendid dancer, for he loved music, and kept such time; but you know,” she would say, “we liked to talk better than to dance together at Horncastle, or Spilsby, or Halton; he always had something worth saying, and said it so quaintly.” Rosa at eighty-three recalled the same times with animation, and said to me, “You know we used to spoil him, for we sat at his feet and worshipped him; and he read to us, and how well he read! and when he wrote us those little poems we were more than proud. Ah, those days at Somersby and Harrington and Halton, how delightful they were!”

The Halton family were a decade younger than Charles, Alfred, and Mary Tennyson, but Drummond married eight years before Alfred. Emily Sellwood, just before her marriage with Alfred, wrote to Mrs. Drummond Rawnsley:

My dearest Katie—You and Drummond are among the best and kindest friends I have in the world, and let me not be ungrateful, I have some very good and very kind—Thy loving sister

Emily.

The use of the thy is very frequent with the Sellwoods, and in all Mary Tennyson’s letters too.

It was at Halton, in the time of its next Rector, Drummond Rawnsley, that the farmer Gilbey Robinson gave his son Canon H. D. Rawnsley the famous advice which the Poet has preserved in his Lincolnshire poem “The Churchwarden and the Curate”:

But creeäp along the hedge bottoms an thou’ll be a Bishop yit.

And it was at Halton that Mr. Hoff, a large tenant farmer, lived of whom Dr. Tennyson heard many a story from the Rector. He was quite a character, and the Lord Chancellor Brougham was brought over by Mr. Eden from Harrington to see and talk with him. I knew Mr. Hoff, and have heard the Rector describe the lively afternoon they had. Farming was one of Lord Brougham’s hobbies, and he talked of farming to his heart’s content, and was delighted with the old fellow’s shrewdness and independence, and his racy sayings in the Lincolnshire dialect, the kind of sayings which Tennyson has preserved in his “Northern Farmer.” The farmer, too, was pleased with his visitor, but he said to the Rector afterwards, “He is straänge cliver mon is Lord Brougham, and he knaws a vast, noä doubt, but he knaws nowt about ploughing.” It was the same farmer who was introduced by the Rector to the leading Barrister at the Spilsby sessions, where both the Rector and Dr. Tennyson were always in request to dine with the bar, when the Judge was at Spilsby, for the charm of their presence and the brightness of their conversation. Mr. Hoff had seen “Councillor Flowers” in Court in his wig and gown, but meeting him now in plain clothes, and finding him a very small man, he said to him straight out, “Why, you’re nobbut a meän-looking little mon after all.” These tenant farmers, whether in the Marsh, wold, or fen, were very considerable people in days when agriculture was at its best. In the Marsh, one in particular, Marshal Heanley, was always termed the Marsh King. He it was who at the Ram-show dinner at Halton, when Ed. Stanhope, the Minister for War, had spoken of the future which was opening for the great agriculturists, and, after alluding to Lord Brougham’s visit to the Shire and the sending of some farmers’ sons to the Bar, had suggested the possibility of one of them arriving at the top of the tree and sitting some day on the Woolsack. The “Marsh King” got up and said, “I allus telled yer yer must graw wool; but when you’ve grawed it, yer mustn’t sit on it, yer must sell it.”

There was a good deal of humour and also of characteristic independence about both the farmers and their men in those days; the Doctor’s own man, when found fault with, had flung the harness in a heap on the drawing-room floor, saying, “Cleän it yersen then.” And at Halton Rectory an old Waterloo cavalryman was coachman, who kept in the saddle-room the sword he had drawn at Quatre-Bras, a delight to us boys to see and hear about. He had a way of thinking aloud, and when, driving once at Skegness, he saw the Halton schoolmaster, his particular aversion, Mrs. Rawnsley heard him say, “If there ain’t that conceäted aäpe of ourn.” On a later occasion, when, at a rent-day dinner, he was handing round the beer, and the schoolmaster asked, “Is it ale or porter?” in a voice heard by all the table he replied, “It’s näyther aäle nor poörter, but very good beer, much too good for the likes o’ you, so taäke it and be thankful.” Perhaps his most famous saying was addressed to my younger brother who, when attempting to copy his elders who always jumped the quickset hedge opposite the saddle-room as a short cut to the house, had stuck in the thorns and cried, “Grayson, Grayson, come and help me out!” The old man slowly wiped his hands, and with his usual deliberation said, “Yis, I’m a-coming.” “But look sharp, confound you, it’s pricking me.” “Oh, if you’re going to sweër you may stay theër, and be damned to you.”

From Halton the way is short to Spilsby, the market town where the Franklins had lived, and the statue of Sir John resting his hand on an anchor looks down every Monday on the chaffering Market folk at one end of the Market Place, whilst the women still crowd round the old Butter-cross at the other end. In the Church is the Willoughby chapel, full of interesting monuments.

Many of the Franklin family lie in the Churchyard, and on the Church wall are three tablets to the three most distinguished brothers,—James, the soldier, who made the first ordnance survey of India; Sir Willingham, the Judge of the Supreme Court of Madras; and Sir John, the discoverer of the North-West Passage. Hundleby adjoins Spilsby where Mr. John Hollway lived, of whom the Poet wrote: “People say and I feel that you are the man with the finest taste and knowledge in literary matters here.” Next to Hundleby comes Raithby, the home of the Edward Rawnsleys, where the Poet was a frequent visitor, and thence passing Mavis-Enderby on the left, the road runs on the Ridge of the Wold through Hagworthingham to Horncastle, the home of the Sellwoods. Mavis-Enderby is referred to in Jean Ingelow’s poem, “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571”:

Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!
······
The brides of Mavis Enderby.

After a visit to Raithby in 1874 Alfred wrote to Mrs. Edward Rawnsley:

My dear Mary—I stretch out arms of love to you all across the distance,—all the Rawnsleys are dear to me, and you, though not an indigenous one, have become a Rawnsley, and I invoke you in the same embrace of the affection, tho’ memory has not so much to say about you.

At Keal, east of Mavis-Enderby, the Cracrofts, whom the Doctor knew well, were living; and below the far-famed Keal Hill, in the flat fen, lay Hagnaby Priory, the home of Thomas Coltman, whose nephews Tom and George were often there. George, a genial giant of the heartiest kind, became Rector of Stickney, half-way between Keal and Boston; he was one of the Poet’s closest friends. In a letter to the Rector of Halton he says, “Remember me to all old friends, particularly to George Coltman”; and in after years he seldom met a Lincolnshire man without asking, “How is George Coltman? He was a good fellow.” Agricultural depression has altered things in Lincolnshire. Among the farmers the larger holders have disappeared in many places, and in the pleasant homes of Halton and Somersby, such men as the Rectors in those Georgian and early Victorian days, Nature does not repeat.

The departure of the Tennyson family made a blank which could never be filled. The villagers whom they left behind never forgot them, and even in extreme old age they were still full of memories of the family, and talked of the learning and cleverness of “the owd Doctor,” the fondness of the children for their mother and, most noticeable of all, their “book-larning,”

And boöks, what’s boöks? thou knaws thebbe naither ’ere nor theer.

The old folk all seemed to think that “to hev owt to do wi boöks” was a sign of a weak intellect. “The boys, poor things! they would allus hev a book i’ their hands as they went along.” A few years ago there was still one old woman in Somersby who remembered going, seventy-one years back, when she was eleven years old, for her first place to the Tennysons. What she thought most of was “the young laädies.” She was blind, but she said, “I can see ’em all now plaän as plaän; and I would have liked to hear Mr. Halfred’s voice ageän—sich a voice it wer.”

Frederick Tennyson.

TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS FREDERICK AND CHARLES

By Charles Tennyson[11]

My uncle Frederick lived near St. Heliers, and my father and I visited him (1887) in his house, overlooking the town and harbour of St. Heliers, Elizabeth Castle, and St. Aubyn’s Bay. The two old brothers talked much of bygone days; of the “red honey gooseberry,” and the “golden apples” in Somersby garden, and of the tilts and tourneys they held in the fields; of the old farmers and “swains”; of their college friends; and of the waste shore at Mablethorpe: and then turned to later days, and to the feelings of old age. My father said of Frederick’s poems that “they were organ-tones echoing among the mountains.” Frederick told Alfred as they parted that “not for twenty years had he spent such a happy day.”—Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son.

Of all the brothers of Alfred Tennyson the closest akin to him were Frederick and Charles. The three were born in successive years, Frederick in 1807, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. They slept together in a little attic under the roof of the old white Rectory at Somersby, they played together, read together, studied together under the guidance of their father, and all three left home to go together to the school at Louth, which Alfred and Charles at least held in detestation until their latest years. Frederick was the first to break up the brotherhood, for, in 1817, he left Louth for Eton, but to the end of his long life—he outlived all his brothers—he seems to have looked back on the days of his childhood through the medium of this fraternal trinity. Years afterwards he wrote of their common submission to the influence of Byron, who “lorded it over them, with an immitigable tyranny,” and a fire at Farringford in 1876 brings to his mind the destruction of their Aunt Mary’s house at Louth, in the gardens of which he wrote: “I, and Charles, and Alfred, enthusiastic children, used to play at being Emperors of China, each appropriating a portion of the old echoing garden as our domain, and making them reverberate our tones of authority.”

At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and strength would have well qualified them to excel, and passed their time chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat shores of their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the Poems by Two Brothers, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John’s, Cambridge (his father’s old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the £10 which the publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoarse on the shore as they rolled out poem by poem in one another’s ears. The notes and headings to the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from Byron, five from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa’s Voyages, Beattie, Rennel’s Herodotus, Savary’s Letters, Tacitus’ Annals, Pliny, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Racine, the Mysteries of Udolpho, La Auruncana, the Songs of Jayadeva, Sir William Jones (History of Nadir Shah, Eastern Plants, and Works, vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful, Dr. Langhorne’s Collins, Mason’s Caractacus, Rollin, Contino’s Epitaph on Camoens, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young, Sale’s Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature, Sallust, Terence, Lucretius, Coxe’s Switzerland, Rousseau, the Ranz des Vaches, Baker on Animalculae, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd scraps of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.

Alfred and Charles followed Frederick to Cambridge in 1828 and entered Trinity, whither their elder brother had just migrated from John’s. All the three brothers attained a certain amount of rather unconventional distinction at the University; Frederick, who had taken a high place on his entrance into Eton and subsequently became Captain of the Oppidans, obtained the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode (in Sapphic metre) on the Pyramids, the last cadence of which, “ὀλλυμένων γὰρ ἄχθων ἐξαπολειται,” is the only fragment which tradition has preserved. Charles obtained a Bell Scholarship in 1829, chiefly through the beauty of his translations into English (one line, “And the ruddy grape shall droop from the desert thorn,” was always remembered by Alfred), and the youngest brother secured, as is well known, the University Prize for English Verse with his “Timbuctoo.” None of the brothers, however, attained great distinction in the schools, though Frederick and Charles graduated B.A. in 1832. With the end of their Cambridge careers the brotherhood finally dissolved. It was at first proposed that all three should (in deference to the wish of their grandfather), become clergymen. Frederick had always shown a certain independence and intractability of character. At Eton, though a skilful and ardent cricketer, he acquired a reputation for eccentricity, and Sir Francis Doyle describes him as “rather a silent, solitary boy, not always in perfect harmony with Keate,”—a gentleman with whom most spirits, however ardent, generally found it convenient to agree.

Sir Francis recounts one typical incident: Frederick, then in the sixth form, had returned to school four days late after the Long Vacation. Keate sent for him and demanded an explanation. None was forthcoming. Keate stormed in his best manner, his prominent eyebrows shooting out, and his Punch-like features working with fury, Frederick remaining all the while cynically calm. Finally the fiery doctor insists with many objurgations on a written apology from the boy’s father, whereupon the culprit leisurely produces a crumpled letter from his pocket and hands it coolly to the head-master. A fresh tirade follows, accusing Frederick of every defect of character and principle known to ethics, and concluding, “and showing such a temper too”!

How little Frederick regarded himself as fitted for Holy Orders may be judged from a letter he wrote in 1832 to his friend John Frere: “I expect,” he says, “to be ordained in June, without much reason, for hitherto I have made no kind of preparation, and a pretty parson I shall make, I’m thinking.” The grandfather came apparently to share this conclusion, for the ordination never took place.

It must have been about this time that Frederick made the acquaintance of Edward FitzGerald, who was two years his junior. The pair maintained a close correspondence for many years, and “Fitz” became godfather to one of his friend’s sons and left a legacy to be divided among his three daughters.

Frederick’s fine presence and frank, tempestuous, independent nature seem to have made a powerful appeal to the younger man, for he had the great height, noble proportions, and dome-like forehead of the Tennyson family, and was so robustly built that it is said that in later years, when he lived in Florence, a new servant girl, on seeing him for the first time speeding up his broad Italian staircase in British knee-breeches, fell back against the wall in astonishment, exclaiming, “Santissima Madonna, che gambe!” Unlike his brothers, however, his hair (which he wore rather longer than was common even at that time) was fair and his eyes blue.

“I remember,” wrote Fitz in 1843, “the days of the summer when you and I were together quarrelling and laughing.... Our trip to Gravesend has left a perfume with me. I can get up with you on that everlastingly stopping coach on which we tried to travel from Gravesend to Maidstone that Sunday morning: worn out with it we got down at an Inn and then got up on another coach, and an old smiling fellow passed us holding out his hat—and you said, “That old fellow must go about as Homer did,” and numberless other turns of road and humour, which sometimes pass before me as I lie in bed.”

And in the next year he writes:

How we pulled against each other at Gravesend! You would stay—I wouldn’t—then I would—then we did. Do you remember that girl at the bazaar ... then the gentleman who sang at Ivy Green?

And seven years later Gravesend and its ἀνήριθμοι shrimps are still in his memory.

Very soon, however, after leaving Cambridge, Frederick, who had inherited a comfortable property at Grimsby, set out for Italy, and in Italy and near the Mediterranean he remained, with the exception of an occasional visit to England, until 1859.

He was passionately fond of travel, which, as he used to say, “makes pleasure solemn and pain sweet,” and even his marriage in 1839 to Maria Giuliotti, daughter of the chief magistrate of Siena, could not induce him to make a settled home. In 1841 we hear of him (through “Fitz”) in Sicily, playing a cricket match against the crew of the Bellerophon on the Parthenopaean Hills, and “sacking the sailors by ninety runs.” “I like that such men as Frederick should be abroad,” adds the writer, “so strong, haughty, and passionate,” and in 1842 “Fitz” pictures him “laughing and singing, and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of the warm South.” All the while he continued to write to FitzGerald “accounts of Italy, finer” (says the latter) “than any I ever heard.”

Once he describes himself coming suddenly upon Cicero’s Formian villa, with its mosaic pavement leading through lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain bubbling up “as fresh as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator sitting there in the stillness of the noonday, devoting the siesta hours to study.” FitzGerald replies with letters full of affection; he sighs for Frederick’s “Englishman’s humours”—for their old quarrels: “I mean quarrel in the sense of a good, strenuous difference of opinion, supported on either side by occasional outbursts of spleen. Come and let us try,” he adds, “you used to irritate my vegetable blood.” “I constantly think of you,” he writes, “and as I have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love I feel towards but two or three friends ... you, Spedding, Thackeray, and only one or two more.” And again: “It is because there are so few F. Tennysons in the world that I do not like to be wholly out of hearing of the one I know.... I see so many little natures that I must draw to the large.”

All this time Frederick was writing verse and Fitz constantly urges him to publish. “You are now the only man I expect verse from,” he writes in 1850, after he had given Alfred up as almost wholly fallen from grace. “Such gloomy, grand stuff as you write.” Again: “We want some bits of strong, genuine imagination.... There are heaps of single lines, couplets, and stanzas that would consume the ——s and ——s like stubble.”

Much of their correspondence is taken up with the discussion of music. They both agree in placing Mozart above all other composers. Beethoven they find too analytical and erudite. Original, majestic, and profound, they acknowledge him, but at times bizarre and morbid.

“We all raved about Byron, Shelley, and Keats,” wrote Frederick long after, in 1885, “but none of them have retained their hold on me with the same power as that little tone poet with the long nose, knee-breeches, and pigtail.” Indeed he was at different times told by two mediums that the spirit of Mozart in these same knee-breeches and pigtail accompanied him, invisibly to the eye of sense, as a familiar. Music was the passion of Frederick Tennyson’s life. It was said among his friends that when he settled in Florence (as he did soon after 1850), he lived in a vast Hall designed by Michael Angelo, surrounded by forty fiddlers, and he used to improvise on a small organ until he was over eighty years of age.

“After all,” he wrote in 1874, “Music is the Queen of the Arts. What are all the miserable concrete forms into which we endeavour to throw ‘thoughts too deep for tears’ or too rapturous for mortal mirth, compared with the divine, abstract, oceanic utterances of that voice which can multiply a thousandfold and exhaust in infinite echoes the passions that on canvas, in marble, or even in poesy (the composite style in aesthetics), so often leave us cold and emotionless! I believe Music to be as far above the other Arts as the affections of the soul above the rarest ingenuity of the perfect orator! Perhaps you are far from agreeing with me. Indeed the common charge brought against her by her sisters among the Pierides—and by the transcendentalists and philosophical Critics—is that She has no type like the other Arts on which to model her creations and to regulate her inspirations. I say her inexhaustible spring is the soul itself, and its fiery inmost—the chamber illuminated from the centre of Being—as the finest and most subtle ethers are begotten of, and flow nearest to the Sun.”

Frederick lived at Florence till 1857 and found there, after years of wandering, his first settled home. The idea of settling tickled his humour, and in 1853 he writes: “I am a regular family man now with four children (the last of whom promises to be the most eccentric of a humorous set) and an Umbrella.” In Florence he came in contact with Caroline Norton and her son Brinsley, of the latter of whom he writes an amusing account:

Young Norton has married a peasant girl of Capri, who, not a year ago, was scampering bare-footed and bare-headed over the rocks and shingles of that island. He has turned Roman Catholic among other accomplishments—being in search, he said, of a “graceful faith.”... Parker has just published a volume of his which he entitled “Pinocchi: or Seeds of the Pine,” meaning that out of this small beginning he, Brin, would emerge, like the pine, which is to be “the mast of some great Admiral,” from its seedling. He is quite unable to show the applicability of this title, and, seeing that the book has been very severely handled in one of the periodicals under the head of “Poetical Nuisances,” some are of opinion that “Pedocchi” would have been a more fitting name for it. However, to do him no injustice, he has sparks of genius, plenty of fancy and improvable stuff in him, and is, moreover, a young gentleman of that irrepressible buoyancy which, to use the language of the Edinburgh Review, “rises by its own rottenness....” As I said, he is not more than three-and-twenty, but is very much in the habit of commencing narrative in this manner: “In my young days when I used to eat off gold plate!” to which I reply, “Really a fine old gentleman like you should have more philosophy than to indulge in vain regrets.”

While we were located at Villa Brichieri, up drove one fine day the famous Caroline, his mother, who, not to speak of her personal attractions, is really, I should say, a woman of genius, if only judged by her novel, Stuart of Dunleath, which is full of deep pathos to me. I asked Brin one day what his mother thought of me. He stammers very much, and he said, “She th-th-th-thinks very well of you, but I d-d-don’t think she likes your family.” “Good heavens! here’s news,” I said. Well, afterwards she told me of having met Alfred at Rogers’, and of having heard that he had taken a dislike to her. “Why, Mrs. Norton,” I said, “that must be nearly thirty years ago, and do you harbour vindictive feelings so long?” “Oh!” she said, “why, I’m not thirty!”

Again, one day we met her in a country house where we were invited to meet her, and soon after she had shaken hands with me she said, with a dubious kind of jocosity, “I should like to see all the Tennysons hung up in a row before the Villa Brichieri.” Upon the whole, I thought her a strange creature, and she has not yet lost her beauty—a grand Zenobian style certainly, but, like many celebrated beauties, she seems to have won the whole world. Among other things she said in allusion to some incident, “What mattered it to me whether it was an old or a young man—I who all my life have made conquests?” It seemed to me that to dazzle in the great world was her principal ambition, and literary glory her second.[12]

But Frederick was too much of a man of moods to care for society. He used to describe himself as a “person of gloomy insignificance and unsocial monomania.” Society he dismissed contemptuously as “Snookdom,” and would liken it gruffly to a street row. The “high-jinks of the high-nosed” (to use another phrase of his) angered him, as did all persons “who go about with well-cut trousers and ill-arranged ideas.” The consequence was that his acquaintance in Florence long remained narrow. In 1854, shortly after the birth of his second son, he wrote:

Sponsors I have succeeded in hooking, one in this manner: A friend of mine called yesterday and introduced a Mr. Jones. “Sir,” said I, “happy to see you. Like to be a godfather?” “Really,” he said, not quite prepared for the honour, “do my best.” “Thank you, then I’ll call for you on my way to the church”; so Mr. Jones was booked.

One hears, however, of a visit of Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide Kemble) in 1854. “I had not seen her for twenty years,” writes Frederick; “she is grown colossal, but all her folds of fat have not extinguished the love of music in her.” But one friendship which Frederick made in Florence was destined to be a lifelong pleasure to him. In 1853 he writes:

The Brownings I have but recently become acquainted with. They really are the very best people in the world, and a real treasure to that Hermit, a Poet. Browning is a wonderful man with inexhaustible memory, animal spirits, and bonhomie. He is always ready with the most apropos anecdote, and the happiest bon mot, and his vast acquaintance with out-of-the-way knowledge and the quaint Curiosity Shops of Literature make him a walking encyclopaedia of marvels. Mrs. B., who never goes out—being troubled like other inspired ladies with a chest—is a little unpretending woman, yet full of power, and, what is far better, loving-kindness; and never so happy as when she can get into the thick of mysterious Clairvoyants, Rappists, Ecstatics, and Swedenborgians. Only think of their having lived full five years at Florence with all these virtues hidden in a bushel to me!

In 1854 he published his first volume of verse, Days and Hours. The book was, on the whole, well received. Charles Kingsley (whose early and discriminating recognition of the merits of George Meredith places him high among the critics of his day) wrote: “The poems are the work of a finished scholar, of a man who knows all schools, who has profited more or less by all, and who often can express himself, while revelling in luxurious fancies, with a grace and terseness which Pope himself might have envied.” There was, however, a good deal of adverse criticism, and it was probably mainly owing to his irritation at many of the strictures (often futile enough) which were passed upon him at this time that he kept silence for the next thirty-six years. At any rate, he was always ready to the end of his life for a growl or a thunder at the critics.

In 1857 Frederick Tennyson left Florence and after spending some time in Pisa and Genoa finally settled in Jersey, where he made his home for nearly forty years. During all this period he maintained a regular and detailed correspondence with Mrs. Brotherton, the wife of his friend Augustus Brotherton, the artist, with whom he had begun to exchange letters while still at Florence. His life was now a very quiet one, for, except for an occasional visit to England, he never left home. His children with their families visited him from time to time. His brother Charles came with his wife to see him in 1867, as did the Brownings on their way to Italy, and Alfred also paid him visits, the last of which was in 1892. On the whole, however, his days, for one who had been so passionately fond of travel and of a life of colour, warmth, and excitement, were singularly peaceful. But he retained to the last his astonishing vitality. His health remained tolerably good in spite of the nervous irritability and reactions of melancholy which were inseparable from the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his temperament. “Poor Savile Morton used to stare at me with wonder,” he writes. “‘I cannot conceive,’ he said, ‘how a man with such a stomach can be subject to hypochondria.’” In 1867, at the age of sixty, he batted for an hour to his nephew Lionel’s bowling, hoping thereby to be able “to revive the cricket habit,” and his mind continued extraordinarily active; not a movement in world politics or thought escaped him; he read voraciously and continued to write verse in a rather desultory fashion. His appetite for beauty, too, remained as keen as ever and even developed. “The longer I live,” he wrote in 1885, “the more delicate become my perceptions of beautiful nature.” And that appetite found ample food in the scenery of the bowery island, the whole ambit of which, with its curling tree-tops and distant lawny spaces dappled with sunshine and surrounded, as it seemed, by the whole immensity of the globe, could be seen from a point near his house.

In his isolation, however, his active mind tended to become more and more possessed by certain ideas, with which everything he read and heard was brought into relation. While still at Florence he had (possibly under the influence of Mrs. Browning) become greatly interested in the teachings of Swedenborg and the phenomena of spiritualism which seemed to him a natural development of Swedenborg’s theories. At first he was apt to speak rather lightly of spirit revelations. In 1852 he wrote to Alfred:

“Powers the sculptor here, who is a Swedenborgian, says he once had a vision of two interwoven angels upon a ground of celestial azure clearly revealed to him by supernatural light after he had put out his candle and was lying awake in bed, and believes that these are only the beginning of wonders; the spirits themselves announce the dawn of a new time and the coming of the Millennium, and he firmly believes that all we now do by costly material processes will in the returning Golden Age of the world be accomplished for us by ministering spirits. ‘Thou shalt see the angels of heaven ascending and descending on the Son of man.’ I go with him as far as to believe that these are spiritual revelations, but I confess I cannot accompany him in his belief in their beneficent intentions. God speaks to the heart of man by His Spirit, not thro’ table legs; the miracles of Christ were of inestimable worth, but these unfortunate ghosts either drivel like schoolgirls or bounce out at once into the most shameful falsehoods, and by their actual presence, pretending to be in their final state, they seem to have for their object, tho’ they carefully avoid touching on those subjects, to undermine in the hearts of Christians the spiritual doctrines of the Resurrection of the spiritual body and of the judgment to come. And the more effectually to unsettle the old Theology, the cant of these spirits is that God is a God of Love, Love, Love, continually repeated ad nauseam. So He is, but ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor My ways your ways,’ ‘He scourgeth every son that He receiveth,’ ‘He loveth those whom He chasteneth,’ ‘it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,’ ‘the pitiful God trieth the hearts and the reins.’ But these spirits, by for ever harping upon the Love of God in their insipid language, seem to me to be anxious to persuade us that He is a ‘fine old country gentleman with large estate,’ or something of that kind, seated in a deeply-cushioned armchair, and patting the heads of His rebellious children when they come whimpering to Him, yielding to anything in the shape of intercession, and, rather than that St. Joseph or any other saint should be offended, ready to admit a brigand into Heaven. So that I thoroughly distrust your spirits and expect no virtue will come out of them. They only seem to me last links in the chain of modern witchcrafts which will probably end with the Devil.”[13] And a little later he writes: “Owen the Socialist and a host of infidels by a peculiar logical process of their own, after seeing a table in motion, instantly believe in the immortality of the Soul. To me it is astounding and even awful, that in this nineteenth century after Christ—whose resurrection of the body rests on as strong a ground of proof as many of the best attested historical events—men should be beginning again with that vague and unsatisfactory phantom of a creed which must have been old in the time of Homer.”

It was not long before he became a complete convert to Swedenborgianism and firmly convinced of the reality of the Spiritualistic phenomena with which the press and literature of the day began to be flooded. Indeed at one time he believed that spirits communicated with himself by a kind of electrical ticking, which he was constantly hearing in his room at night, and used at their dictation to do a certain amount of automatic writing. The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that he was forced to conclude the spirits to be of an evil and untrustworthy nature, and he therefore abandoned the practice of spiritualism altogether. He remained, however, convinced of the fact that living men were able to communicate with the spirits of the departed, who had been able, since the end (in 1757) of the second dispensation (according to Swedenborg) and the abolition of the intermediate state of purgatory which accompanied it, to establish direct intercourse with our world, and he believed that this rapid increase of communication was a sign of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, of the total abolition of all barriers between the material and spiritual worlds, and the actual physical regeneration of man in the Millennium predicted by Christ and the prophets. The natural and political tumults of which the nineteenth century was so prolific seemed to him to point in the same direction, and to fall in with the prophecy of Daniel which he was never tired of quoting.

Frederick abandoned these views at the end of his life, but it is not difficult to see how they came to acquire such a hold on him. He was essentially a mystic and clung most fervently to the belief in a future life, where all good things should be taken up into the spiritual life and glorified.

“My daylight,” he wrote in 1853, “is sombered by a natural instinct of unearthliness, a looking backwards and forwards for that sunny land which Imagination robes in unfailing Summer where no tears dim the Light, and no graves lie underneath our feet, by the side of which Riches, honors, even Health the first of blessings, all, in short, that is commonly called Happiness, looks cold and imperfect—while the great Shadow of Death fills up the distance, and the steps to it lie over withered garlands and dry bones.” And again: “For an illustration of the bliss and delight of that higher state of being which under the influence of that Spirit-Sun shall hereafter rise daily to its appointed task, whatever that may be, with full heart and mind—I go back to ‘the days that are no more,’ when I used to dive into the sunny morn, rejoicing in my strength, refreshed with dreamless sleep ‘like a giant with wine,’ carrying my whole soul with me without fears or regrets, with a joy focussed like sunlight through a lens, on the infinite present moment! Such memories, tho’ mournful, are blessed if they bring with them analogies of the ‘Higher State to Be.’ For the angel is but the infant sublimated—the rapture and the innocence, with the Wisdom and the Power adjoined, and crowned with Immortality! That is to say his will being in all things conformable to the Divine—he receives the divine influences which are heaven! And surely my unshakable belief is that all created beings—even those who have chosen the lowest Hell—will be eventually redeemed, exalted, and glorified—or there would be an Infinite Power of Good unable or unwilling to subdue Finite Evil.”

His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the “frowzy diatribes of black men with white ties—too often the only white thing about them” (one can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the “little papacies” that dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape his wrath.

Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even greater bitterness, as the following letter shows:

This, as you truly say, is the age of Atheism—both practical and professional. But it is not only Bradlaugh and Mrs. —— who distinguish it as such—multitudes of most worthy and respectable people (in their own estimation) are classifiable under this category. Indeed all worldly people whose religion consists in saving appearances, all self-interested folk whose lives are passed in struggles with their neighbour for their own advantage—all such as wear down heart and mind and even physical well-being in the feverish ambition to pile up riches, not knowing who shall gather them or purely for the renown of possessing them. All ritualists who think they get to heaven by peculiar haberdashery, and intoning the prayers, which makes a farce of them by depriving them of articulate meaning. All believers in the vicarious atonement of faith alone, which creed signifies that all has been done instead of all has to be done for them. All who hurry to conventicles on Sunday with gilt-edged prayer-books, and begin on Monday morning to slander, ill-treat, or cheat their neighbours. In short all that excludes the spiritual from this life—which generally indicates unbelief in any other and virtually denies the necessity, and therefore the existence, of a Divine Governor. All Professors —— and —— in Physical science, all Herbert Spencers, etc. in metaphysical—who arrive by different courses at the same conclusion, viz. that God is unknowable [sic] and that therefore they need not take the trouble to know Him. All this is but Atheism virtual and avowed.

And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should have come to regard the phenomena of spiritualism as the strongest evidence of those beliefs which were to him more important than life itself, and, this conviction once established, submission to the strange genius of Swedenborg followed almost as a matter of course, for by his “science of correspondencies,” the new phenomena seemed to fall naturally and inevitably into their proper place in that strange dual scheme of spirit and matter into which Swedenborg had resolved the Universe. When he had once embarked upon Occultism, other curious beliefs followed in the train of these main convictions. He became greatly impressed with the work of a certain Mr. Melville who believed that he had rediscovered an ancient and long forgotten method of reading the stars which was in fact the original mystery of Freemasonry. Frederick took eagerly to this idea which seemed to fall naturally into place with the Swedenborgian science of correspondencies, and in 1872 he actually came to England with Mr. Melville in the hope of being able to convince the Freemasons that all modern Masonry with its boasted mysteries was futile and meaningless without the key of Mr. Melville’s discovery in which lay the true explanation of all the masonic signs and symbols. Unfortunately an interview with the Duke of Leinster, the then Grand Master, gave the two apostles little satisfaction. It was on this visit that Frederick saw FitzGerald for the last time, and the latter described him to Mrs. Kemble as being “quite grand and sincere in this as in all else; with the Faith of a gigantic child—pathetic and yet humorous to consider and consort with.”

The influence of these ideas gradually coloured Frederick’s view on all current subjects. His years in Florence had been spent in the “hubbub of imminent war,” and he writes indignantly of “the rottenness of these pitiable petty States and the incredible fantastic tricks of their abominable rulers.” None the less, though he hated and despised most existing monarchies, he was too much imbued with the romance and dignity of the past to look with a very favourable eye on revolution. At first he dismissed Mazzini as “deserving a hempen collar with Nana Sahib and the King of Delhi,” an opinion which the experience of later years compelled him to reverse. The story of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to him chaos, but it was the chaos which was to precede the new spiritual dispensation, and political prejudice never hindered him from the true appreciation of progress. Thus he writes in 1869:

It is certain that Evil has never been more rampant than during the last century—witness the great French Revolution, subsequent wars, minor revolutions, and minor wars throughout the globe, the hundreds of millions wasted on warlike machinery, the countless numbers of young men sacrificed to the fiends of ambition and racial jealousy, society honeycombed with frauds, conspiracies, and class animosities, etc. etc. On the other hand, never has knowledge of all kinds been more progressive, never have the Arts and Sciences and Literature been so rapidly multiplied and so various. Never were charitable institutions more widely extended or practically beneficent. Never, in short, were the researches into all kinds of truths, especially those which concern the relations of man to God and his neighbour, more earnest, and if this seems to contradict the notorious fact that we are living at present in a world of Atheism and Materialism—which is the same thing—it does not really do so, for the two movements, though separate, are parallel and simultaneous. In short, “The Time of the End” is a transitional state—which will eventually issue in the triumph of Good over Evil once and for ever.

France he always hated as the leader of materialism, and he would repeat with a snort of disgust the remark of M. Bert, who, during the debate in the Chamber on the secularization of Education, observed that it was superfluous to exclude what did not exist. The debacle of 1870 seemed a just if tragic retribution.

“One cannot help, however,” he wrote on October 19, 1870, “feeling for beautiful Paris as one would for a Marie Antoinette passing on her way to execution. There she is in her solitude and in her beauty. Around her a circle of iron and fire—within her a restless seething of tumultuous passions embittering the present—her future a prospect of burning and famine. Such a downfall is unparalleled in history, and the agonies of her expiration—if things are carried to their bitter end—promise to equal those of the terrible siege of Jerusalem.”

As might be expected, he tended to Conservatism in politics; Home Rule was anathema, and Disraeli, endeared to him as the possible leader of a United Israel, he regarded as a sincerer statesman than Gladstone. None the less he was able to applaud Gladstone’s action on the occasion of the Bulgarian atrocities, though “even he” seemed to have yielded so much

... to the delicacies and squeamish sensibility, and fluttering nerves of a lolling generation—an age of sofas and carpets—the rousing of which even in the justest of causes, the vindication of the rights of unoffending humanity outraged by savages in comparison with whom niggers and Red Indians are angels, is not to be attempted without careful thought—and though a great cry has gone through the land I fear there will be little wool. There is, however, one consolation—neither Turkey, nor Egypt, nor any ruffian with a bundle of dirty clothes upon his head instead of a hat, will ever get another farthing of our money.

None the less he hated a bigoted Toryism, and thought that “a proper democratic spirit which aims at a reconstruction of society on the principle of ‘each for all and all for each,’ the correlation of privileges and duties, worth and honour, wealth and charity (in its best sense), the substitution of altruism for egoism, ought to find its echo in every loyal heart—and would in fact be the very ‘end of Sin, and bringing in of the Everlasting Righteousness’ foretold.”

In literature, too, his mind—in spite of an occasional failure to recognize individual genius—was remarkably alive to the progressive movements of the day. Indeed, for a man so steeped in classicism, his freedom from prejudice was remarkable. Browning’s poetry, however, in spite of his affection for the author, he could never appreciate. He wrote to Mrs. Brotherton:

“What you say of Browning’s Ring and the Book,” he says, soon after the publication of that work, “I have no doubt is strictly applicable, however slashing.... I confess, however, that I have never had the courage to read the book. He is a great friend of mine.... But it does not follow that I should put up with obsolete horrors, and unrhythmical composition. What has come upon the world that it should take any metrical (?) arrangement of facts for holy Poesy? It has been my weakness to believe that the Fine Arts and Imaginative Literature should do something more than astonish us by tours de force, black and white contrasts, outrageous inhumanities, or anything criminally sensational, or merely intellectually potent. As you say a good heart is better than a clever head, so I say better a page of feeling than a volume of spasms. Spasms, I fear, is the order of the day. The late Lord Robertson, a legal celebrity at Edinburgh, pleading on behalf of some one, said, with his serious face, which was more tickling than the happiest efforts of Pantaloon: ‘We are bound to respect his feelings as a man and a butcher.’ Here the man and the butcher are bound up in one. Now, in Browning’s case, I separate the man from the butcher. I have nothing to say to him in his blue apron and steel by his side, but if I meet him in plain clothes I honour him as a gentleman.” And in 1885 he writes: “The Public, it would seem, is beginning to rouse itself to a perception of the unreliability of the Browningian school—I have seen several articles on that subject. How is it that it has never struck his partisans that the probability of one man being so infinitely superior to his contemporaries as to be totally unintelligible to them—is infinitely small?

“One thing appears to me certain in Browning, that all his performances are pure brain-work—whatever that may be worth—but as for the ‘divine heat of temperament,’ where is it? I can find nothing but the inextricably hard and the extravagantly fantastical. On such diet I cannot live.”

Nevertheless, it was always the future of Art, not its past, which stirred his interest, and a letter of his written in 1885, when he was seventy-eight, shows a youth and vitality of mind truly remarkable in one whose life had been so cloistered.

“There can never,” he says, “be a second Shakespeare, that is to say, given a man of equal Genius he cannot in this complex and analytical age of Literature embody himself in the metrical and dramatic form if his purpose is to ‘hold up the mirror to Nature, and to give the Time its form and pressure.’ The form of prose fiction is a vastly greater one, indeed it may be termed all-comprehensive, and admits of the introduction of lyric or epic verse, in all varieties, as well as the profoundest analysis of character and motive, and is susceptible of the highest range of eloquence and unrhythmical poetry, and whatever it may lose in metrical melody (which, however, is not greatly regarded in dramatic dialogue) it gains immeasurably in its other elements. All things considered, I am of opinion that if a man were endowed with such faculties as Shakespeare’s, they would be more freely and effectively exercised in prose fiction with its wider capabilities than when ‘cribbed, cabined, and confined’ in the trammels of verse.”

It may be that the very remoteness of his life was in part the cause of this lasting freshness and freedom of his mind. He lived so far from the world as to be almost entirely removed from any bias of self-interest—the most fruitful source of prejudice. Ambition played no part in his life.

“Once,” he wrote in 1888, “I used to have some ambition—that is when I was a boy at school—I verily believe that at that early age I exhausted the demoniacal passion which chains you to fixed purposes like a Prometheus and preys upon you like a Vulture. Though many great works have been accomplished under the spur of this (so-called) noble passion, think how much chaotic rubbish has been projected into Space and Time which ought to have been imprisoned to Eternity—how many heart-burnings, jealousies, and disappointments—how often the love of the Beautiful and True is entirely subordinated to that of mere distinction to be won at any cost. How seldom do we hear writers of the same school speak well of one another. Especially poisonous are poets, I think, wherever they apprehend a rival—Honey-suckers like the Bee, they know how to use their stings even while sipping the flowers. The unambitious man is at any rate free to use his eyes, to walk up to and contemplate in the pure clear air and solitude of his mountain-top the face and form of Nature, and like Turner a-fishing, see wonderful effects never to be come at by the hosts of those who get on (or off) by copying one another. I daresay you will disapprove all this and attribute it to indolent epicurism.

“Latterly since the supernatural and the Future Life, and its conditions ‘such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive,’ have occupied and absorbed my whole soul to the exclusion of almost every subject which the Gorillas of this world most delight in, whether scientific, political, or literary—I have been led to see what men in general consider a proper use of their stewardship, i.e. ruin of body and soul by inordinate superhuman struggles for supremacy—Samson-like heavings to upset the neighbour, or supplant him—carbonic acid-breathing creepings along the dark floors of stifling caverns such as may enable them to scrape together a preponderance of a certain mineral, etc. etc.—as the most lamentable examples of Phrenitis—arising simply from the ineradicable instinct—of Immortality it is true, but misplaced Immortality—Immortality in this life.”

The death of his wife in 1880 was a severe blow to him.

“In answer to your kind letters of sympathy,” he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Brotherton, “I can say but little. Sorrow such as mine when it falls upon the aged is virtual paralysis, mental and bodily. I know not what I may do for the brief period remaining to me in this world. At present my daughter-in-law attends to household matters, and I still have the presence of children and grandchildren to remind me that I am not left entirely desolate. But my chief consolation is that the beloved of my youth and the friend of my age is already risen, and has cast off the burthen of her mortal cares and pains, and my only hope that, God willing, I may follow quickly.”

A great but less tremendous shock to him was the death in 1887 of his sister Emily, once the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. On this occasion he sent the following lines to his friend:

Farewell, dear sister, thou and I
Will meet no more beneath the sky:
But in the high world where thou art
Mind speaks to Mind, and Heart to Heart,
Not in faint wavering tones, but heard
As twin sweet notes that sound accord.
Thy dwelling in the Angel sphere
Looks forth on a sublimer whole,
Where all that thou dost see and hear
Is in true concord with thy soul—
A great harp of unnumbered strings
Answering to one voice that sings:
Where thousand blisses spring and fade
Swiftly, as in diviner dream,
And inward motions are portrayed
In outward shows that move with them:
After the midnight and dark river
No more to be o’erpast for ever.
Behold the lover of thy youth,
That spirit strong as Love and Truth,
Many a long year gone before,
Awaits thee on the sunny shore:
In that high world of endless wonder
Nor Space, nor Time can hold asunder
Twin souls—as Space and Time have done—
Whom kindest instincts orb in One.

It was inevitable that the later years of one so aged and so solitary should be more and more filled with the chronicle and anticipation of death. But he never sank into lethargy, as the following letter, written in his eighty-first year, shows:

My own sorrow is indeed continually revived by memories continually reawakened, not only by the comparatively recent occurrence of my own temporarily final separation from my best friend—but also by that bird’s-eye—so to speak—retrospect, which carries the imagination over lovely landscapes of the days of youth—out of the golden morning light of which emerge, in that unaccountable manner which is quite involuntary, even the most trivial circumstances—moments of no moment—yet somehow clothed in a more glittering light than the vast tracts drowned in the general splendour of the dawn, some tiny pinnacle that reflects the sun, some far off rillet that gushes out from the wayside.

Even when in his eighty-fourth year his sight began to fail him and the loss drove him still more back into his inner life, the old eagerness of mind remained, though finding a melancholy occupation in noting the changes to which age was daily subjecting his mental and physical constitution. The note of hope is, however, ineradicable:

An old man of my great age is already dead—old age being the only Death—and the faculties which I once possessed receive no impulse, as of old, for activity—no joyous inspiration. The intellect is cold and frozen like the mountain streams in Winter, a moonless midnight; and were it not for the increasing illumination of the immortal spirit which already beholds the dawn of a greater Day beyond the mountains, I should indeed be desolate, lost! For I am 84 years of age next June—and in looking back through my long life—it often seems to me like a dream—many movements, intellectual and physical, seem to me like impossibilities. When I see my little grandson Charlie skipping and hear him shouting and singing, and the light-limbed and light-hearted girls darting like living lightning down the staircase (which if I were to attempt to imitate I should undoubtedly break my neck), I say to myself, is it possible that I can ever have been like them? Alas! for old age. What can be more mournful than a retrospect of the days of childhood? But a truce to solemn thoughts—the Spring is come again, the leaves are unfolding, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, and surely, next to the human countenance, this is the most lovely emblem, the most beautiful representative material of inner spiritualities and the resurrection, and ought to have been so regarded since the dawn of Christianity; for as sure as Winter blossoms into Summer, the Winter of old age will spring into the Eternal Life. Fear not, hope all things! What a contrast to these consoling aspirations is presented in the touching fragment of the old Greek poet Moschus which no doubt expresses the scepticism of the ancient world—I give a free translation:

Aye, aye the garden mallows, mint and thyme
When they have wither’d in the winter clime,
After a little space do reappear,
And live again and see another year:
But we, the brave, the noble, and the wise,
When once for all pale Death hath closed our eyes,
Sink into dread oblivion dark and deep,
The everlasting, never-waking sleep.

With the approach of death he seemed to himself to undergo a kind of physical regeneration.

“Apropos to spiritual matters,” he writes in 1890, “I have had recently for several consecutive days some very strange experiences. One morning I awoke and seemed to have lost my natural memory. Objects daily presented to me for years seemed no longer familiar as of old—but as when a man after years of travel returning to his home and the chamber he formerly occupied takes some time and labour of thought to bring back to his recollection the whereabouts of objects once (as it were) instinctively known to him—I had the same difficulty in recovering my relations to my own surroundings. And this for days was supplemented by a strange sense of having been far away and conversant with wonderful things—movements and tumults—which only immeasurable distance deadened to my perception like great music borne away by the wind. Ever and anon there flashed up within me what I can only describe symbolically as Iridescences of feeling as when the prismatic colours of a rainbow succeed one another, or the coloured lights in Pyrotechnics cause objects in midnight darkness to assume their own hues. But all this, wonderful though it may seem, is not the only change that has come upon me—I am happy to say that simultaneously with these phenomena a revolution in my spiritual economy of far greater moment has, I believe, taken place. I have always prayed for that regeneration, or second birth (‘Thou must be born again,’ said the Lord to Nicodemus), to be shielded from selfhood—and as the divine answer to such prayers continually repeated, I can declare, without any self-delusion, that the answer has actually been a sensible change in the nature of my affections. Never have I felt towards those around me, such tender inclinations, such earnest desire to do them all possible good regardless of self-interest, such a spirit of forgiveness of any wrongs; and my earnest prayerful thankfulness for such inestimable benefits has been invariably acknowledged by that Voice from the Lord Himself by which He has repeatedly ratified to my spiritual ear His promise of blessing and the continuation thereof—and that ‘Thou hast nothing to fear, for I am with thee night and day, body and soul!’ Think of this! But for God’s sake do not attribute these statements of mine, which are comprehended in a period of many years, to self-delusion or self-righteousness. God knows, from whom nothing is hid, that I have never approached Him except in the spirit of profound humility and self-condemnation, and the answer has always been, ‘Thou hast nothing to fear. I am with thee.’”

As age settled upon him the violence of many of his views abated. His faith in Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism lost their hold on him and gave way to a more philosophic condition of mind. His activity, however, continued unabated. In 1890, after a silence of thirty-six years, he published his Isles of Greece, and the success of the volume encouraged him to give to the world two others, Daphne and other Poems in 1891, and Poems of the Day and Year (in which were included some of the verses contained in the volume of 1854) in 1898. In 1896 he left Jersey to join his eldest son, Captain Julius Tennyson, in whose house in Kensington he died on February 26, 1898.

It would be difficult to imagine two persons more strongly contrasted in life and character than Frederick and Charles. Charles (who was always Alfred’s favourite brother) had nothing of the powerful, erratic, tempestuous mind of his elder brother. One does not think of him, as FitzGerald did of Frederick, as a being born for the warmth and glow of the South, yet in appearance he was (like Alfred) far more Southern than the eldest brother. So Spanish were his swarthy complexion, brown eyes, and curly, dark hair, that Thackeray, meeting him in middle age, called him a “Velasquez tout craché.” Like Alfred, too, he had a magnificent deep bass voice; and even in dress the two brothers seem to have maintained their affinity, for Charles used to wear a soft felt hat and flowing black cloak much like those which the Millais portrait has identified with his brother, and these garments, with the addition of white cuffs, which he wore turned back over his coat sleeves, intensified the strangely foreign effect of his appearance. But the kinship of the two brothers extended beyond purely physical resemblance. They remained inseparable companions till Charles was ordained, and there was hardly a taste possessed by either which the other did not share. They read, played, and rambled together; both were extremely fond of dancing (one of Charles’s last Sonnets was “On a County Ball”) and were much sought after as partners at the balls of their countryside. The Poems by Two Brothers, which were almost entirely the work of Alfred and Charles, while displaying the differing qualities of each, were a joint production, the fruit of common reading and common enthusiasm. Both the brothers were regarded by their contemporaries at Cambridge as destined to achieve poetical greatness. Both possessed the unwearying patience of the craftsman, the same devotion to science and the same power of close and loving observation. Charles, however, lacked the fire and energy of temperament which made Frederick’s character remarkable and was to a great extent shared by Alfred. With all Alfred’s sensitiveness and shrinking from society, he had little of that sympathetic and passionate interest in the hopes and achievements of their age which drove the younger brother ever more and more into public life.

Charles Tennyson-Turner.

Nothing quieter and less eventful than Charles Tennyson’s life can well be imagined. He was ordained in 1835 (three years after taking his degree) and immediately obtained a Curacy at Tealby. In the same year he became Vicar of Grasby, a small village in the Lincolnshire wolds between Caistor and Brigg.

In the following year he married Louisa Sellwood, whose sister was to become Alfred’s wife, and from that time until just before his death on April 25, 1879, his life, save for an occasional holiday and too frequent lapses from health, knew little variation. Like all the Tennysons, Charles was of a nervous temperament, and this condition often induced acute suffering. So severe indeed was his struggle with this disorder and the still more perilous condition which resulted from it that at one time, soon after his marriage, he was compelled to leave his parish for some months in search of strength. Throughout these trying interludes the devotion of his wife, a woman of great humour and power of mind and character, was of the utmost service to him. Indeed, his debt to her was great at all times of his life. She would often act almost as a curate to him in the straggling parish, tirelessly visiting and nursing the sick (a duty which they both unflinchingly observed even in the epidemics of small-pox which were then frequent), keeping all his accounts, both personal and parochial, and even sometimes writing his sermons. The devotion of the pair was remarkable, retaining a certain youthful ardour to the end, and when Charles died his wife was carried to the grave within a month.

As early as 1830, Charles had published a small volume of sonnets, which (as is well known) earned the hearty commendation of Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. As in the case of Frederick, however, there followed a prolonged silence, the next volume not making its appearance till 1864; others followed in 1868 and 1873, and all were collected and republished, with a sage, benevolent, and affectionate Introduction by his friend James Spedding, in 1880. The reason for this long silence was a slightly different one from that which was responsible for Frederick’s intermission. In both cases, no doubt, the feeling that it would be impertinent for another person of the name of Tennyson to put his work before the public had some influence. In Charles’s case, however, there were further considerations. The violent shock which his health sustained by that prolonged early illness and his subsequent troubles to some extent numbed his powers. “The edge of thought was blunted by the stress of the hard world,” and the same cause probably increased his natural modesty till it became almost morbid. He was perpetually haunted by the fear that his poetry was not original, and the only word of satisfaction which Spedding ever heard him use of any of his sonnets was with regard to one which owed its origin to a period of deep affliction, of which the poet said that he thought it was good because he knew it to be true. Whatever the cause, however, during these thirty-four years Charles Turner published nothing and, indeed, hardly even wrote anything. Spedding, in his Introduction, has collected a few fragments which were gathered from the poet’s notebooks, and show that his mind still occasionally noted a stray simile or description, doubtless intended to be subsequently worked up into a poem. A few of these are in his happiest manner. One may quote the following picture of goldfish in a glass bowl:

As though King Midas did the surface touch,
Constraining the clear water to their change
With shooting motions and quick trails of light.
Now a rich girth and then a narrow gleam,
And now a shaft and now a sheet of gold.

and the lines on the opening of the tomb of Charlemagne:

They rove the marble where the ancient King,
Like one forspent with sacred study sate,
Robed like a King, but as a scholar pale.

His mind, too, was always working in the same direction on his rambles about the countryside, and he would sometimes, when walking with Agnes Weld, “the little, ambling, stile-clearing niece,” who was often his guest, hit on some phrase which took his fancy and was imparted to his companion, who remembers his description of the slanting light-bars on a cloudy day as “the oars of the golden Galley of the sun,” and many another phrase as happy as any of the homely and perfect touches in his published works.

But though these years were barren of actual output, they were of value in many ways, and not the least as a period of incubation, for many a phrase or idea first formed in them was subsequently perfected and published. The intermission, too, left him freer to study and to labour among his parishioners. At the beginning and end of his life, poetry occupied a great deal of his time, for each of his sonnets, in spite of their apparent facility, was the result of much toil. He would work at the same lines morning after morning, and read the results aloud to his wife, or niece, or other companion after dinner, the same poem going through a great succession of forms. A letter to Miss Weld, in answer to some suggestion of a subject connected with the then recent excavations at Mycenae, shows his method of work and something of the manifold interests of his secluded life:

“I never can undertake to work to order,” he writes, “though the order comes from the dearest of customers. If I get a good hold of that poor, noble, nodding head I will put him on board of a respectable sonnet and try to save his memory from drowning.... Mycenae is a very exciting subject, but I have Kelsey Moor Chapel to write on—a commission from Mrs. Townsend ... and a poor dead dog haunts me” (see Sonnet 97—Collected Edition).

During these barren years Charles Turner’s devotion to his parochial work was intense. Grasby was a somewhat barbarous village when he obtained the living. Belief in witchcraft was still rife, and one of the popular charms against its influence was to cut a sheep in half, put the body on a scarlet cloth, and walk between the pieces. Such religion as there was among the poor was of a rather harsh spirit, as may be seen from an anecdote preserved by Miss Weld of an old cottager, who, hearing Mrs. Turner mention the name of Hobbes, exclaimed to his wife: “Why, loovey, that’s the graate Hobbes that’s in hell!” The climate, too, was as harsh as the character of the people, for the village stands high and bleak. Friends remember Louisa Turner going about her ministrations in clogs, and during one particularly sharp winter she writes: “I am in a castle now of double cotton wool petticoat and thick baize drawers and waistcoat.” The Turners soon found it necessary to leave the house at Caistor, three miles off, where Sam Turner, Charles’s uncle, the preceding vicar, had lived, for the distance made any real intimacy with the people impossible. Charles had inherited a small property from his uncle (the event was the occasion of his change of name), and this made it possible for him to build a new vicarage and to further enrich the village with new schools and a new church. He also took the very practical step of buying the village inn and putting it in charge of a reliable servant, a scheme which, for a time at least, had excellent effects on the temperance of the inhabitants.

There were no children of the marriage, but the pair adopted the children of the whole village, opening their house and grounds to them for Christmas trees and summer festivities. Children and animals were always devoted to Charles Turner, as he to them. He was, as the villagers said, “Strangen gone upon birds and things.” He never shot after that tragedy of the swallow which he never forgot (see Sonnet 200), and birds of every kind flocked to him daily as he fed them on his lawn. Flowers and trees, too, he loved almost as keenly as he did children. He quarrelled seriously with one of his curates whom he found exorcising the flowers, which were to be used for church decoration, by means of the service contained in the Directorium Anglicanum, maintaining stoutly that if any spirits dwelt in flowers they must be angels and not devils. His garden was a jungle of old-fashioned flowers, golden-rod, sweet-william, convolvulus, and rose of Sharon; figs and apricots ripened on his walls, and the house was covered with roses, honeysuckle, white clematis, and blue ceanothus. The grounds, too, boasted some fine timber, which Charles never would allow to be pruned or cut, even permitting the willow-props to outgrow and destroy the rose trees (Sonnet 270), and once, when it was proposed to fell some large trees within sight of his house, he threatened to throw up his living and leave Grasby.

In this peaceful world Charles found plenty to occupy his time. He saw little of society except when Alfred or Frederick, or one of his old college friends, came to visit him, and the resources of the neighbourhood were strained to the utmost to afford them entertainment. He found, however, a congenial companion in Mr. Townsend, a neighbouring clergyman of wide culture much interested in science. And the care of his parish occupied the greater part of his time. Theology, too, was a favourite study with him. He began life as an Evangelical, but in later years tended (partly under the influence of his wife, who would often, on the vigil of a saint, spend half the night on her knees) more and more towards the High Church.

“I have been reading,” he wrote to Alfred in 1865, “Pusey’s Daniel the Prophet, which (thank God) completely—as I think and as very many will think with me—disposes of the rickety and crotchety arguments of those who vainly thought they had found a ποῦ στῶ in him whereby to upheave all prophecy and miracle. It is a noble book from its learning and its logic. I knew he was a holy and noble-minded and erudite man, but for some reason I had not credited him with such ‘act offence’ and powers of righteous satire.... I have never in my old desultory reading days found such a charm and interest as in the study of the Queen Science, as Trench calls Theology, and those who assume that they will find there no food for the mature reason will be surprised at its large provision for the intellect and rich satisfaction of the highest imagination. It is reading round about a subject and not the subject itself which damages the intellect so much. Maurice said the study of the Prophets had saved him from the Tyranny of books.”

He and his wife also spent much time in the study of Italian, in which they were assisted by their occasional visits to and from the Frederick Tennysons. Charles’s Italian Grammar is annotated with numberless quaint rhymes made to fix its rules in his memory. On one page one finds in his wonderfully neat fluent hand (strangely like those of Frederick and Alfred):

From use of the following is no ban,
“The fair of the fair is Mistress Ann”
or “Smith’s a learned, learned man”
In English or Italian,
Though the English use is far less common
Speaking of Doctor or fine woman.

On another:

Say profeta, profeti
Or else I shall bate ye.

On another a couplet which has all the subtle romance of Edward Lear:

Rare and changeless, firm and few,
Are the Italian nouns in U.