Alfred Lord Tennyson; a study of his life and work

Preface

This volume was completed, all but the last page of biography, when the sudden illness of Lord Tennyson startled me at the task of minute revision, which I had hoped might long be my pleasant occupation. Such as it is, the book has been my companion during the last two years, and grew into shape as the natural result of a love for the poetry, and a desire to possess in convenient shape all that could be recorded of the life of one whom I regarded with sincere enthusiasm.

In process of time, no doubt, a life of Lord Tennyson will be written, based upon material which at the present moment is in the possession of the family. The present volume does not pretend to be the official life of the late Poet Laureate, and expressly deprecates the supposition that it is built upon any but public data ; nevertheless it will not be found to be altogether devoid of novelty. Perhaps I may claim to have searched more patiently and widely than any of my predecessors for every available record ; and I certainly have left no important source of likely information untested. It is my hope, therefore, that without trespassing upon any one's privacy, or committing any act of literary indiscretion, I have been successful in making a study of Lord Tennyson more x PREFACE

complete, more detailed, and, I hope, more accurate than any at present in the possession of the public.

I must acknowledge, in the first instance, the kind help and sympathetic interest of Mr. J. Dykes Campbell, who generously placed at my disposal his valuable collection of Tennysoniana ; and, secondly, of Mr. Austin Dobson, who has not only encouraged me in my task, but has allowed me to attach his name to this volume.

I also desire to express my indebtedness to Mr. W. Aldis Wright's Life a?id Letters of Edward Fit 2 Gerald, and Mr. T. Wemyss Reid's Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton, from which much valuable information has been gathered.

The second and third editions have been amplified by several personal notes for which I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, Professor F. T. Palgrave, Dr. A. H. Japp, and other friends.

Other aid and other encouragement, which I had hoped to acknowledge, must here be left, by promise, to the more difficult tribute of silence.

ARTHUR WAUGH.

October 1893.

Chapter I Chapter V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII xii CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

QUEEN MARY AND HAROLD .... IJ2

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

FROM TIRESIAS TO DEMETER . . 2l8

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Portrait of Lord Tennyson, after G. F. Watts, R.A. Frontispiece

(By permission of the Proprietors of Black and White.)

Somersby Rectory ...... 3

Somersby Church ...... 5

Holywell Glen . . . . . . .9

Bridge Street, Louth . . . . . .11

Westgate Place, Louth . . . . . .12

Tennyson's Rooms, Corpus Buildings, Cambridge . . 20

Hallam'' s Rooms, New Court, Trinity .... 22

Clevedon Church ...... 56

Fireplace in the Cock Tavern ..... 63

In the Garden at Swainston .... 86

Exterior of Shiplake Church ..... 90

Interior of Shiplake Church ..... 93

Shiplake Rectory . . . . . -95

The Hallam Metnorial Tablet . . . . .101

Hon. Hallam and Lionel Tennyson, after G. F. Watts, R.A. 107

Farringford {front view) . . . .Ill

The * Maud ' Cedar at Swainston . . . .117

Facsimile of MS. from ( Gar -eth and Lynette* . . . 141

' The Quarried Downs of Wight' . . . .158

Aldworth, Surrey . . . . . .167

Farringford (back view) . . . . .181

Facsimile Letter . . . . . .211

Portrait of Lord Tennyson . . . . .213

(By permission of Messrs. Cameron' and Smith.) Tennyson V Bridge, Farringford . . . .233

CHAPTER I

The study of a life and work, the beginnings and growth of which, while they lie beyond our own memory, are still w r ithin the limits of present report, is beset with many difficulties. Reminiscences and sentiments which are purely personal stand in the way of clear judgment ; trivial anecdotes, often half or wholly untrue, are still in the air, and the voices of sound and unsound criticism are too closely blended for an unprejudiced view of the position which the author's work will ultimately attain. But apart from these difficulties, which are common to all studies in contemporary literature, a life of Alfred Tennyson is made the harder to write by his own discouragement of the attempt. Once or twice in the history of letters the situation has repeated itself. Shakespeare's ' Cursed be he who moves my bones,' Thackeray's 'Let there be none of this nonsense about me after my death,' Gordon's 1 Better be dead than praised,' and Tennyson's ' My Shakespeare's curse on clown and knave who will not let his ashes rest,' are expressions of an identical feeling, coloured a little differently by the variety in the temperament of the speakers. Such a sentiment may, one feels, be uttered with all sincerity at the moment, yet with no intention of giving it the weight and authority of an ultimatum; still the sentiment, once written 'down, remains to confront the biographer at the outset. Reflections and memories of this kind have filled the present w r riter with a very genuine diffidence in undertaking a work which reverent affection has made in every sense a labour of love.

A

For, before he can write a word about Tennyson, he is bound to excuse himself for writing about him at all, and to make his peace w T ith that implacable deprecation of ' the irreverent doom of those that wear the poet's crow r n.' The cause might be pleaded in many ways. The writer could, perhaps, defend his right to speak on the ground of his intention in speaking; he could maintain that what has been written, though it might indeed be worthier, has been written in no spirit of irreverent paragraph-making, no desire to rush in where better taste would shrink to tread, but with every instinct of respect and veneration. The case could conceivably be stated so. But the present writer prefers to keep the inconsiderable shadow 7 of himself in the background, and to base his excuse not on his own treatment of the life, but on the very nature of the life itself. There are lives which require much tact in the writing, much weighing of what shall be said and what left unsaid, much veiling of ugly scars, much concealment of deformities. It is not so with Tennyson. His life has been so peaceful, so far removed from the smoke and stir of the world of petty aims and narrow ambitions, so free from passages to be passed over in silence, and events to be excused, that nothing, it seems, but grossly bad taste or hopelessly incorrect judgment on the part of the writer, could cause him to offend seriously in his work. And he can scarcely be condemned as too sanguine, who trusts at least to escape an accusation of such faults as these.

The life of Tennyson remains to be written. Materials must exist which are at present inaccessible to any but the poet's nearest relatives ; the few who were privileged to know him intimately have, no doubt, much to tell of him that must here be left untold. The present work makes no claim — indeed, it could ill afford to do so — to give a detailed and finished portrait, or even an exact epitome of events. Yet, until an authoritative biography be forthcoming, there must, we hope, be some who would wish to know a little more of a life, the high thought, earnestness, and love of which are so clearly written in the work it leaves behind it. For such readers, what reverence and sincere admiration could do has been done in the present pages.

Of the many temptations to artifice and ingenuity which beset the biographer, none is more alluring than the charm of insisting upon the influence which the surroundings of childhood exercise upon the after life. It is so easy to draw parallels and trace tendencies, and to appear rather clever in the process of so doing, that one is apt to forget that this is nothing but fancy after all, and that Truth is not found on these surface-levels. Lives which become crowded with events in the period immediately following childhood are not greatly moved by the earliest influences of all. The power of childhood over later years belongs rather to uneventful lives, and Tennyson's was just the kind of life to fall under its spell. The character and scenery of his home-life had a more than ordinary share in his development, for he lived in its immediate neighbourhood, in daily familiarity with the 'grey hillside/ 'the seven elms and poplars four,' the brook and ' the ridged wolds,' for the first twenty years of his life : the period, in short, during which impressions are most vivid, and the mind readiest to receive them. The influences of the home-life and homescenery set their mark upon him very early, and never left him. More than forty years after Tennyson went up to Cambridge, his friend FitzGerald could trace them in ' The Last Tournament,' in a description of a wave spending itself upon the shore. * That w r as Lincolnshire, I know,' FitzGerald wrote.

It was in Lincolnshire, at Somersby Rectory, that Alfred Tennyson w r as born, on Sunday, August 6, 1809. His father, the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., held this living, to w r hich he w r as appointed in 1807, in connection with those of Grimsby and Bag Enderby; his mother was a daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, Vicar of Louth, the town in which Alfred's school-days were afterwards passed. Somersby itself is but a tiny village; in 1821 there were sixty-two inhabitants in all. Alfred was one of twelve children, seven of whom were sons, Frederick and Charles (afterwards Charles Tennyson Turner), poets both, being his seniors. The home and its surroundings were full of a picturesque charm. The Rectory is a rather low, twostoreyed building, on one side separated from the road by a narrow drive, upon the other faced by a mossy lawn with' a stretch of meadow-land beyond. A quaint old-fashioned dining-hall, with mediaeval windows, built by the poet's father, extends the house to the right, as one looks up at the Rectory from the lawn. It was in this hall that the family was wont to gather on winter evenings for round

SOMERSBY CHURCH.

games and conversation. On the north a straggling road winds up the steep hill towards the summit of the wold, while on the south a pebbly brook babbles along close to the edge of the garden. Not at all the sort of scenery one associates with the fen-country : instead of dreary waters and low-lying levels, the landscape sweeps up into hills and drops into valleys, full of the sights and sounds of countrylife, and rich in flowery hollows and patches of tangled meadow-land. It requires no strain of imagination to catch the spirit of Tennyson's song here, where the little brook of his poem dances along through the heart of the country, chattering as it goes, while not far from Somersby the traveller is shown an old, half-ruined grange which fancy dreams over as the probable original of Mariana's prison.

The process of identification, however, has led more than one writer into difficulties. Poetry is not always inspired by its surroundings. * Break, break, break,' for instance, has been generally ascribed to the influence of Clevedon. But we have Tennyson's own denial. * It was made,' he said, 'in a Lincolnshire lane at five o'clock in the morning.'

Such, among these Lincolnshire lanes, was the poet's home, and from stray allusions here and there we get glimpses of the inmates of the Rectory itself. The father was a man of many interests, something of a poet and an artist, much of a scholar and a linguist, and, above all, of powerful physique. The poet's mother was of a sweet and tender disposition. A story is told of village roughs who traded on her gentleness by beating their dogs within hearing of the Rectory windows, in hope of a 'tip' to induce them to spare the unfortunate victims of their greed. A combination of the parents' qualities often reappears in the children, and it seems only natural to trace to the father's influence the power and energy of ' Maud ' and 'The Idylls,' to the mother's the tender passion of 'In Memoriam ' and ' The Princess.'

Such specious fancies are, perhaps, a little too artificial to be insisted upon with any freedom ; but much of the poet's earlier life has to be left to conjecture and imagination of one kind and another; for the actual, palpable facts that come to hand are very meagre indeed. Still the few there are have value. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, in a delightfully picturesque paper published some years since in Harper's Magazine, and since reprinted in book-form, gives us a glimpse of Alfred Tennyson when he was no more than five years old. She tells of him caught and swept along by the wind down the Rectory garden, crying as he was hurried past : ' I hear a voice that 's speaking in the wind.' It was his first line of poetry, and the idea was not to leave him with the moment. The sound of the storm has always had a voice for Tennyson, as clear in later years as when it first whispered to his babyhood. The miserable mother in 'Rizpah' catches ' Willy's voice in the wind;' Arthur, sleeping before his last battle, hears the ghost of Gawain shrilling through the wandering wind : ' Hollow ! Hollow, all delight!' To the nurse in 'The Children's Hospital' the voice of the wind blends mysteriously with { the motherless bleat of a lamb in the storm and the darkness without.' One cannot help fancying — nor is it, perhaps, too curious a fancy — that this story of his childhood, told to the poet afterwards, has recurred to him, half unconsciously, when from time to time his mind was dwelling on the idea of storm and tumult. The wind has always had a voice that speaks to him; as every common sight and sound of nature has spoken to him, and inspired him with a new interpretation.

A story of this kind now and again seems to show the bent of his mind ; but in the nursery and schoolroom days Alfred was not the most prominent member of the family. A retiring and reserved disposition, rare in children, rendered him comparatively unattractive ; and Charles, who, though a year his senior, was much more boyish and high-spirited, naturally had qualities which were quicker to make friends for him. Charles was, indeed, a universal favourite; and a story told of the two brothers seems to indicate that, with all his youthful spirits, he actually developed the earlier of the two. One Sunday, when the rest were going to church, Charles suggested that Alfred should fill up the time by writing some poetry, giving him as a subject the flowers in the Rectory garden. By the time the service was finished Alfred had filled his slate with verses, which he hastened to submit to his brother's criticism upon his return. Their attitude to each other, the mutual relation of poet and critic, shows, as Mr. H. J. Jennings has shrewdly remarked, that Charles was regarded, at any rate by his younger brother, as the cleverer of the two.

These verses on the garden flowers were not Alfred's only attempt at youthful poetry. The next time he essayed verse his grandfather was the task-master, and the subject the death of the poet's grandmother. For this first 'In Memoriam' the critic slipped half a sovereign into the boy's hand, with the remark — just a little like a snub, — 4 That is the first money, my boy, that you've made by poetry ; and — take my word for it — it will be the last ! '

To those who are rich in the wisdom that comes after the event, the sentence sounds like a text for a little sermon on the futility of prophecy.

A piece of verse, ' On the Death of my Grandmother/ occurs in Poems by Two Brothers, and this, no doubt, was an emended version of the early effort. It opens quietly, and with a certain sober dignity :

* There on her bier she sleeps !

E'en yet her face its native sweetness keeps. Ye need not mourn above that faded form, Her soul defies the ravage of the worm ; Her better half has sought its heavenly rest, Unstain'd, unharm'd, unfetter'd, unopprest ; And far above all worldly pain and woe, She sees the God she almost saw below.'

By this time the application to poetry had become continuous. Between his eleventh and twelfth birthdays Alfred wrote an epic poem of some four or five thousand octosyllabic lines in the manner of Sir Walter Scott ; and three years later he was busy upon a drama in iambics, a chorus from which was afterwards printed in Poems, chiefly Lyrical. These early excursions into poetry were much more ambitious than the work to which he applied himself during his Cambridge Terms; but the young mind is always blind to difficulty.

The children do not seem to have played many games in the old Rectory garden, which must have been very quiet in the dreamy summer afternoons. At that time cricket was not in full vogue ; football was even less popular. A kind of ' King of the Castle J seems to have been the boys' favourite game ; they found scope in it, perhaps, for fancy and imagination beyond the mere pleasure of the exercise.

Another imaginative game is related in Frederick Tennyson's letters as having enlivened his aunt's garden. ' I and Charles and Alfred,' he says, ' enthusiastic children, used to play at being emperors of China, each appropriating a portion of the old echoing gardens as our domain.' In the evening they told long stories round the fire, and Alfred — team -«.

HOLYWELL GLEN in amusing contrast to the quintessential narrative of his prime — is reported to have spent months in the recital of his tale— ' The Old Horse.' The prolixity was to pass with boyhood; it is said that, in after years, he pronounced 4 Mr. Sludge the Medium' terribly long-winded, adding, ' I 'd have done the thing in a third of the space.'

Meanwhile, the lessons were not neglected. Every day io ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

the boys walked to Cadney's village school in Holywell Glen, a deep, shady nook, enshrining the well which tradition magnified into a second Pool of Bethesda. Alfred, we learn, was ill at numbers ; and one of his school-fellows, a little his senior, earned many a tip from the Rector of Somersby by coaching the future poet in his mathematics after school-hours. They must have made an easy-going, rather primitive, and very picturesque life, these early days in Lincolnshire. Bird-nesting on bright spring mornings, rambles by the brook on summer half-holidays to Stockworth, Harrington, or Scrivelsby, gradual familiarity with all the life and growth of the countryside — these were the earliest influences that touched the children of Somersby Rectory, and inspired that harmony of mind with Nature which was afterwards to prove so distinctive a characteristic of the Laureate's verse.

1 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair, Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.'

It needed many years of communion with Nature to give voice to that feeling, that sense of something wanting, that stir of sweet regret that is so easily invoked by the sight of these Scenes of loneliness : but the early days at Somersby helped him to that sympathy with Nature which ripened to maturity in his later verse.

And so one hesitates to pass too rudely over the days of this childhood ; for, uneventful as they were, they were at work all the while on the fibre of the poet's spirit. The spirit was a little too solitary, no doubt, a little too shy and over-reserved : it would have been better for Alfred Tennyson, perhaps, if he had gone early to a great public school and mixed more with action, — fallen sooner into the rush and swirl of life, and had less time to dream. For his school-days seem to have been unusually free from excitement. Cadney's village school was followed by Louth Grammar School, where Alfred went as a new boy in the Christmas term of the year after Waterloo. Under Mr. Waite's mastership Louth was a drowsy little school ;

ii and the terms that Tennyson spent there seem to have brought very little with them to be remembered afterwards. Indeed, there appears to be but one solitary reminiscence of his school-days to record ; and, since it is the one story, it has been told over and over again, so often as to be scarcely worth re-telling. But where there is little, there

BRIDGE STREET, LOUTH.

can be no choice, and our single glimpse of this time must be the poet's own recollection of the festivities on the occasion of the coronation of George the Fourth, when he and the other boys were decked out in rosettes, and there were processions and merry-making.

Alfred seems to have left Louth Grammar School after some four years with Mr. Waite, and was consequently not twelve years old when his school career finally closed. Mrs. Tennyson's mother, Mrs. Fytche, lived with her daughter, Miss Mary Anne Fytche, at Westgate Place ; and

while Alfred

was at Louth, his parents often came and stayed with their relatives, to be near him.

When he left school he went home again to be under his father's tuition. The father was a strong, sensible man, withoutdoubt, full of interests, and an admirable companion for his sons ; but the continued parental supervision was a mistake. A boy of Alfred's sensitive and imaginative temperament needed to be

more among his contemporaries and less by himself. However, his parents thought otherwise ; he came home again, and during the next few years the brothers were together at Somersby.

WESTGATE PLACE, LOUTH.

We learn enough of this period to feel that the studies must have been rather desultory, and the amusements simple enough. Their father's teaching was supplemented by the classics of a Roman Catholic priest and the music of a teacher at Horncastle. For half-holidays they had the endless pleasure of wild rambles over the country with their pipes in their mouths — for Alfred had begun to smoke already. An early love for the seashore was fostered by frequent visits to Mablethorpe, a small town in a flat country, where the sand slowly shifts into banks, and builds up a barrier between the sea and the fields. Here the days would be spent in much the same way as at Somersby — a little roaming about the shore, a little verse-making, and a good deal of dreaming. It was an idle time, but it had its interests.

An affection for animal life was one of Alfred's earliest characteristics. One of the rooms on the second floor was set apart as his den, and here he would sit of an evening, pondering his verses. One night, as he leant from the window, he heard an owl hooting ; and, with a faculty for imitation which was strong in him, he cried back to the bird. The poet's ' tu-whit, tu-whoo ' was so natural that the owl flew to the window, and into the room, where it was captured and kept for a long while as a pet. Ingenuity has traced to this story the origin of the later poem ' The Owl,' which catches with singular fidelity an echo of the bird's cry.

And if we try to take the character out of its surroundings, and to find for ourselves what manner of boy Alfred Tennyson was at this time, we get the clearest insight into his real nature in the anecdote, recorded by Mrs. Ritchie, that tells of the effect of Byron's death upon the household at Somersby.

'Byron is dead \' The whole world seemed full of the cry : and the boy crept away to think its meaning out alone, and to cut 'Byron is dead!' into the sandstone. We get very close to the heart of the child here : the reserve with which he chooses to be by himself, his appreciation of the loss, and his record of it, carved with his knife in the stone, seem to show us the Alfred Tennyson of the moment very vividly indeed. There is the inclination to solitude on the i 4 ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

one hand, and the strength of sympathy and affection on the other, the two dissonant elements in that strange combination which makes him such a powerfully interesting figure. He has had friends who have seen the one side only, and thought him brusque and unsociable; he has had other friends who have shut their eyes to this side of his character, and preferred to dwell on the tender and lovable element. But the true portrait must be frank and candid : and the subject is the more engaging for its contradictory complexity. The little Alfred, creeping off alone to engrave his poet's cenotaph, was a very perfect foreshadowing of that older Alfred who would be silent to his friends for years, and yet in any moment of their trouble send them the strengthening assurance of his tender sympathy. This was the Tennyson who, after long silence, wrote to his old friend, Lord Houghton, condoling with him upon his wife's death ; and wrote in such a strain as this : —

' I was the other day present at a funeral here, and one of the chief mourners reached me her hand silently almost over the grave, and I as silently gave her mine. No words were possible : and this little note, that can do really nothing to help you in your sorrow, is just such a reaching of the hand to you, my old college comrade of more than forty years' standing, to show you that I think of you. '

But all this comparison has carried us a long way from the little boy sitting, knife in hand, by his boulder of sandstone. There is little enough to record, however, of these years between Louth and Cambridge. Frederick went up to Trinity in 1827, and Charles and Alfred were left together at Somersby, living the same home-life — picking up some learning from books (the first volume of poems proves that), and more from Nature, — taking long walks across the country, vying with each other in poetry from time to time ; wanting nothing — save an occasional half-sovereign.

For to many other excellent qualities (it is whispered), the Rector of Somersby added a talent for economy, and Charles and Alfred were never supplied with a surplus of pocket-money. Now and then, when money was needed for some excursion or other amusement, they were sorely put about to scrape together enough for their purpose ; and on one occasion, when they were discussing ways and means in the saddle-room, they were overheard by the family coachman. Appreciating the position at once, and racking his brains for a plan, the servant bethought himself of the verses which his young masters were always writing, — they could not be much good, still they might serve. The idea pleased the boys : it opened a pleasant prospect of a road that led to both wealth and fame at once. They proceeded to make a collection of their best verses, and found they had quite enough for a respectable little volume. So, under the title of Poems by Two Brothers, with a quotation from Martial — ' Haec nos novimus esse nihil ' — on the title-page, the precious manuscript was submitted to Mr. Jackson, a bookseller of Louth, who offered the young poets ten pounds for the copyright of their work, a sum which, we now have it on authority, was subsequently doubled. Ten pounds was great riches to the brothers ; the bargain was struck, and Alfred Tennyson had begun his career as a poet.

Poems by Two Brothers, now, in its original form, a very rare little volume, consists of 102 poems which occupy 228 pages. Quotation and footnote abound, both Latin and English authors being cited with freedom. A reprint of the book was issued in the spring of 1893 by Messrs. Macmillan, and in this edition the separate poems were signed by the initials of their authors, so far as it had been found possible to assign each to its creator. In his preface to the book the present Lord Tennyson expressed his desire that none of the verses signed by his father's initials should be afterwards included in the collected works, — a desire which is amply justified by the necessary immaturity of the work. The poems show considerable facility, and have at intervals much melody and grace in their composition, but are too imitative to be of any real value from other than the biographical point of view.