RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON
By the Rev. H. Montagu Butler, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
You have asked me to put on paper some recollections of the many happy visits which it was my good fortune to pay to Farringford and Aldworth between 1860 and 1890. I wish that I could respond to this kind request more worthily; but the truth is, that, though I have always counted those visits among the happiest events of my life, and though my memory of the general impression left upon me on each occasion is perfectly clear, it is not clear, but on the contrary most confused and hazy, as to any particular incidents.
Speaking first generally in the way of preface, I may say that it would be difficult to exaggerate the hero-worship with which I regarded the great Poet, ever since I was a boy. Before I went up to Trinity in 1851, he had been the delight of my friends and myself at Harrow. And further, through members of the Rawnsley family, I had heard much of his early days when the Tennysons lived at Somersby.
During my life at Trinity, from 1851 to 1855, and then, with long intervals of absence, till the end of 1859, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Tennyson, but especially Tennyson, were the three poets of the nineteenth century who mainly commanded the reverence and stirred the enthusiasm of the College friends with whom I lived. Robert Browning became a power among them almost immediately after, but by that time I had gone back to Harrow. Matthew Arnold and Clough and Kingsley also attracted us greatly in their several ways, and of course Shelley and Keats, but Tennyson was beyond a doubt our chief luminary. “In Memoriam” in particular, followed by “Maud” and the first four “Idylls of the King,” was constantly on our lips, and, I may truly say, in our hearts, in those happy hours.
It was with these feelings, then, and these prepossessions that I was prepared to make the acquaintance of the great Poet, should such an honour ever be granted me. It came first, to the best of my recollection, when my late brother-in-law, Francis Galton, and I were taking one of our delightful walking trips or tramps in the Easter holidays. Galton used to plan everything—district, hours, stopping-places, length of each day’s march. One Easter—I forget which, but it must have been about 1859—was devoted to the New Forest. From there we crossed over to the Isle of Wight; and after visiting Shanklin and Bonchurch, we walked round to Freshwater. To leave Freshwater without paying our homage to the Poet at Farringford was impossible. Whether we had any definite introduction to him, I cannot now remember, but we had reason to think that we should be kindly received. My brother Arthur had lately been paying more than one visit to that part of the Island, and had keenly enjoyed several long walks with him. His report of these was not lost upon me.
Galton had known intimately some of Tennyson’s friends, such as Sumner Maine, W. G. Clark, Franklin Lushington, and specially “Harry” Hallam, younger brother of Arthur. He was, I think, as full of hero-worship for the Poet as I was myself. The fame which he has since won in connexion with Science may make it difficult, even for his later friends, to understand the passion—I can use no weaker word—which he then cherished for some branches of imaginative literature, in particular for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and for at least three of Kingsley’s novels, Alton Locke, Yeast, and Westward Ho! These we used in the course of our Easter rambles to read out in the open air after an al-fresco lunch.
Tennyson’s works were all very familiar to Galton. He had known them at Cambridge as each came out, and had discussed them eagerly with admiring friends, some of them first-rate critics. He delighted not only in the subtlety and elevation and freedom of the thoughts, but also in the beauty and perfection and melody of the expression.
We went, as I have said, to call on the Poet. We went together with rather beating hearts. He received us cordially as Trinity men, but unfortunately I can remember no detail of any kind. I am not sure whether we were even introduced to Mrs. Tennyson. All I remember is that we left the house happy and exhilarated.
But my real acquaintance with the Tennyson family dates from the end of 1861 and the early days of 1862. My first marriage had been on December 19, 1861, and a few days afterwards we came to Freshwater, and stayed at the hotel close to the sea, where Dr. and Mrs. Vaughan had sometimes stayed during his Harrow Mastership. It was then that we first met the Granville Bradleys, destined to be our dear friends for life, and it was in their company that we soon found ourselves most kindly welcomed guests at Farringford.
The two first incidents that I remember were the Poet showing us the proof of his “Dedication of the Idylls,” and, at our request, reading out to us “Enoch Arden.” The “Dedication” must have been composed almost immediately after the death of the Prince Consort on December 14. He seemed himself pleased with it. I thought at the time, and I have felt ever since, that these lines rank high, not only among his other tributes of the same kind, but in the literature of epitaphs generally. We felt it a proud privilege to be allowed to stand at his side as he looked over the proof just arrived by the post, and it led us of course to talk sympathetically of the late Prince and the poor widowed Queen.
Very soon after, the Bradleys and we dined at Farringford. The dinner hour was, I think, as early as six, and then, after he had retreated to his sanctum for a smoke, he would come down to the drawing-room, and read aloud to his guests. On this occasion he read to us “Enoch Arden,” then only in manuscript. I had before heard much of his peculiar manner of reading, with its deep and often monotonous tones, varied with a sudden lift of the voice as if into the air, at the end of a sentence or a clause. It was, as always, a reading open to criticism on the score of lack of variety, but my dear bride and I were in no mood to criticize. The spell was upon us. Every note of his magnificent voice spoke of majesty or tenderness or awe. It was, in plain words, a prodigious treat to have heard him. We walked back through the winter darkness to our hotel, conscious of having enjoyed a unique privilege.
During this vacation I had, as often in after years, not a few walks with him on the downs, leaving the Beacon on the left and going on to the Needles. It was a walk of about two hours. It is here that my memory so sadly fails me as to his talk. In tone it was friendly, manly, and perfectly simple, without a touch of condescension. He seemed quite unconscious that he was a great man, one of the first Englishmen of his time, talking to one young and utterly obscure. Almost any subject interested him, grave or gay. He would often talk of metres, Greek and Latin; of attempts to translate Homer; of the weak points in the English hexameter; or again of more serious topics, on which he had thought much and felt strongly, such as the life after death, the so-called “Eternity of Future Punishment,” the unreality of the world as known to the senses, the grander Human Race, the “crowning race,” still to be born.
Occasionally, not very often in these days, he would speak of his own poems. Once, I remember, a few days after an examination of the sixth form at Harrow, I told him that we had set for Greek Iambics the fine passage in “Elaine,” where Lancelot says to Lavaine:
... in me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great.
There is the man,
pointing to King Arthur. “Yes,” he said in substance, “when I wrote that, I was thinking of Wordsworth and myself.”
I noticed that he never spoke of Wordsworth without marked reverence. Obviously, with his exquisite ear for choice words and rhythm, he must have been more sensitive than most men to the prosaic, bathetic side of Wordsworth; but I never heard him say a word implying that he felt this, whereas I have heard him qualify his admiration for Robert Browning’s genius and his affection for his person by some allusion to the roughness of his style. This, he thought, must lead to his being less read than he deserved in years to come, and he evidently regretted it.
It was in the period, roughly speaking, between 1862 and 1880 that I saw most of him, for it was then our habit to make frequent visits to Freshwater or Alum Bay, generally at Christmas, and we were always received with the same cordial kindness. It was then that the long walks and the readings of his poetry after dinner continued as a kind of institution, and never palled. Among the poems that he read out to us were “Aylmer’s Field,” the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” parts of “Maud,” “Guinevere,” “The Holy Grail,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Revenge,” “The Defence of Lucknow,” “In the Valley of Cauteretz.” With regard to this beautiful poem I cannot help recalling an amusing and most unexpected laugh. He had read the third and fourth lines in his most sonorous tones:
All along the valley, where thy waters flow,
I walked with one I loved two and thirty years ago;
and then suddenly, changing his voice, he said gruffly, “A brute of a —— has discovered that it was thirty-one years and not thirty-two. Two-and-thirty is better than one-and-thirty years ago, isn’t it? But perhaps I ought to alter it.”
It was at this time that we used often to meet Mr. Jowett and also the Poet’s great friend and admirer, the gifted Mrs. Cameron and her dignified and gray-bearded husband, who looked like a grand Oriental Chief.
One trifling incident occurs to me as I write, the Poet’s remarkable skill at battledore. One duel with him in particular comes back to my mind, in which I found it hard to hold my own. He was a very hard hitter. He did not care merely to “keep up” long scores. He liked each bout to be a trial of strength, and to aim the shuttlecock where it would be difficult for his opponent to deal with it. In spite of his being short-sighted he played a first-rate game. With the exception of my brother Arthur, I never came upon so formidable an antagonist.
But I must leave these earlier years, of which I cannot find any written record, and pass on to the end of 1886, when, nearly four years after the death of my dear wife and a year and a half after my leaving Harrow, I was, to my great surprise, appointed Master of Trinity.
On December 3 I was installed, and on December 13 I was invited to Farringford, with the prospect of returning on the 16th to Davos Platz, where I had left my invalid daughter. Of this short visit I find I have made a few notes. The Poet was as cordial as ever. After dinner he took me to his sanctum, and read me his new Jubilee Ode in Catullian metre, and then “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.” Next morning there came a letter from Dr. W. H. Thompson’s executor containing an early poem of Tennyson’s of 1826, and a Sonnet, once famous, complaining of defects in the College system of his day:
Therefore your Halls, your ancient Colleges,
Your portals statued with old kings and queens,
Your gardens, myriad-volumed libraries,
Wax-lighted chapels, and rich carven screens,
Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans,
Shall not avail you, when the Day-beam sports
New-risen o’er awaken’d Albion. No!
Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow
Melodious thunders thro’ your vacant courts
At noon and eve, because your manner sorts
Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart,
Because the lips of little children preach
Against you, you that do profess to teach
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.
About eleven o’clock the Poet took me out alone. We went first to Freshwater Gate, where he said the “maddened scream of the sea” in “Maud” had been first suggested to him. He talked of our late friend, Philip Stanhope Worsley, the translator of the Odyssey and half of the Iliad, who was living there a good many years ago, and whom I had met at his table. He admired him much. He talked also, but I forget to what effect, of “The Holy Grail” and the old Arthur myth, but before this we talked of the Cambridge Sonnet just mentioned. “There was no love,” he said, “in the system.” I understood him to mean that the dons, as a rule, were out of sympathy with the young men. He spoke also of the bullying he had undergone at his first school; how, when he was a new boy of only seven and a half, he was sitting on the school steps crying and homesick. Up came a big fellow, between seventeen and eighteen, and asked him roughly who he was and what he was crying for, and then gave him a kick in the wind! This experience had evidently rankled in his mind for more than seventy years. Again, in April 1890, he told me the same story.
But to return to our morning walk of December 14, 1886. Something led me to speak of my favourite lines:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Spedding, it seems, and others had wanted him to alter the “one good custom.” “I was thinking” he said, “of knighthood.” He went on to speak of his “Experiments in Quantity,” and in particular of the Alcaic Ode to Milton, beginning:
O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies.
“I thought that,” he said, “a bit of a tour de force,” and surely he was right there. He tilted a little at C. S. Calverley for demurring to
God-gifted organ-voice of England.
“I didn’t mean it to be like your
‘September, October, November’;
I was imitating, not Horace, but the original Greek Alcaic, though Horace’s is perhaps the finest metre.” The two Latin metres which I have more than once heard him admire were the Hexameter and the Alcaic.
I find that in my Journal I wrote as regards this walk: “I wish I could remember more. He was wholly facilis, and I never felt less afraid of him or more reverent.” Perhaps I should add that during the walk he told me an extraordinary number of ghost stories—a man appearing to several people, and then vanishing before their eyes.
After dinner that evening we went to his sanctum to hear him read the last Act of the “Promise of May.” “Well, isn’t that tragic?” he naïvely asked at one point, I think where Eva falls down dead.
Next morning, I had to leave quite early for London. He just appeared at the top of the stairs, and offered to come down to say good-bye, but I would not let him. “I can remember little more of this delightful visit,” so I wrote at the time. “He was full, as usual, of the public lies, and the necessity of England being strong at sea.”
I did not see him again till after my second marriage, which took place on August 9, 1888. We paid a flying visit to Lambert’s Hotel, Freshwater, in April 1889. Of this I have made only the scantiest record. Something led us to speak of the famous line in the chorus of the Agamemnon:
ὀμμάτων ἐν ἀχηνίαις.
“So modern,” he remarked. He also spoke of the pathos of Euripides, and of the grandeur of the “Passing of Oedipus” in the Oedipus Coloneus, and Theseus
χεῖρ᾽ ἀντέχοντα κρατός.
He referred again to lack of sympathy in his time between dons and undergraduates. This seemed to be a memory often present to his mind.
Our next visit was in March 1890, when, with my wife’s sister, we stayed at Lambert’s Hotel. On Friday, March 28, we went to tea at Farringford, and found him in his little sun-trap of a summer-house, the evening sun playing full upon us, and bringing into perfect beauty the green lawn, the spreading trees, and the clumps of daffodils. He began by speaking of himself as depressed, but soon smiled away all such symptoms, and made us laugh with a story of the Duke of Wellington, when some prosy personage addressed him with a flattering compliment. He always seemed to enjoy anecdotes of the Great Duke. He was wearing a red cap which, in the sunlight, became him well; but he said playfully that Lady Tennyson disliked it as too suggestive of a “bonnet rouge.” Something, I forget what, led to a reference to the well-known verse:
Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
He once asked a rather gushing lady what sort of birds she supposed these to be. “Nightingales,” was the rather sentimental answer. “Who ever heard a nightingale say ‘Maud’?” was the somewhat stern reply. “They were rooks of course.”
My wife mentioned that she and her sister had been reading the “Idylls” of late. “Do you mean my Īdylls,” he said; “I am glad you don’t call them Ĭdylls.” We soon got talking of his recently published “Crossing the Bar.” When asked what was the precise grammatical reference in the third line of the verse:
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home,
he answered rather emphatically, “I meant both human life[61] and the water.” He went on, “They say I write so slowly. Well, that poem came to me in five minutes. Anyhow, under ten minutes.” Afterwards, when I had some quiet talk with Lady Tennyson, she confirmed what he had implied as to the rapidity with which he usually composed.
At this point I shall do well to insert extracts from my dear wife’s journal, describing a few incidents in what proved our last visit to Farringford. It was at the end of January 1892, when the Poet, born on August 6,[62] 1809, was well on in his eighty-third year. She writes as follows:
VISIT TO FARRINGFORD, JANUARY 1892
By Mrs. Montagu Butler
On January 26 Montagu and I left our two small boys at Eton Villa, Shanklin, to spend the night at Lambert’s Hotel, Freshwater. After leaving our traps at the hotel we walked up to Farringford in time for two o’clock lunch. I sat next the Poet at table, and had some talk with him. He spoke of the metres of Horace, and said that he always thought his Sapphics uninteresting and monotonous. “What a relief it is,” he said, “when he does allow himself some irregularity, for instance:
Laurea donandus Apollinari.”
On the other hand, he admired his Alcaics immensely. The discovery for which he always hoped the most was of some further writings of Sappho herself. He considered the metre beautiful under her treatment.
Then we spoke of Schliemann, of whom I had just been reading in Schuchardt’s book, and he said he had no faith in him. “How could a great city have been built on a little ridge like that (meaning Hissarlik)? Where would have been the room for Priam’s fifty sons and fifty daughters?”
He also thought the supposed identifications of topography absurd, and preferred to believe that Homer’s descriptions were entirely imaginary. When I said that I thought that a disappointing view, he called me “a wretched localizer.” “They try to localize me too,” he said. “There is one man wants to make out that I describe nothing I have not seen.” Also, with some irritation, of other accounts of himself: “Full of lies, and —— made me tell a big one at the end.”
Next day we walked up at about 12.20 to accompany him in his morning walk. Montagu and he were in front, Hallam Tennyson and I behind. Montagu tells me how he was indignant with Z. for charging him with general plagiarism, in particular about Lactantius and other classics, “of whom,” he said, “I haven’t read a word.” Also, of taking from Sophocles, “whom I never read since I was a young man”; and of owing his “moanings of the sea” to Horace’s gementis litora Bospori. Some one charged him with having stolen the “In Memoriam” metre from some very old poet of whom he had never heard. He said, in answer to Montagu’s question, that the metres of both “Maurice” and “The Daisy” were original. He had never written in the metre of Gray’s Elegy, except epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. He admired the metre much, and thought the poem immortal[63].
Hartley Coleridge, he said, spoke of Pindar as the “Newmarket Poet.” He thought the loss of his Dithyrambs most serious, judging from the remaining fragment. He had from early boyhood been familiar with the fact that Wolsey and Cromwell in Henry VIII. were by Fletcher, but he felt absolutely certain that the description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was by Shakespeare’s own hand. He quoted it, as well as several lines from Wolsey. When I said how glad I was he had written about the Duke of Clarence, he said, “Yes, but I wouldn’t write an Installation Ode for the Chancellor.”
So far Montagu reported. After this we others came up, and the old Poet and I walked home together.
We spoke a little of our projected tour to Greece. He had never been there, but would have greatly liked to go—in a private yacht—“but they tell me an old man is safest at home, and I dare say it is true; and I couldn’t stand the vermin!” I told him I was hoping to study classical architecture a little before going out, and he said that he thought, after all, Gothic architecture was finer than classic. “It is like blank verse,” he said; “it will suit the humblest cottage and the grandest cathedral. It has more mystery than the classic.” He thought many of our cathedrals spoiled by their vile glass. He had been disappointed, in his late visit to Cambridge, to notice that the windows in King’s seemed to be losing their brilliancy and to look dark.
After we had been walking a few minutes in silence, he said to me, “Do you see what the beauty is in the line,
That all the Thrones are clouded by your loss?”—
quoting from his still unpublished poem on the young Prince. I said I thought it very beautiful; but he asked if I saw why he had used the word clouded instead of darkened or another. “It makes you think of a great mountain,” he explained. Then he spoke of the great richness of the English language due to its double origin, the Norman and Saxon words. How hard it would be for a foreigner to feel the difference in the line
An infant crying for the light,
had the word baby been substituted, which would at once have made it ridiculous. He told me that his lines “came to” him; he did not make them up, but that, when they had come, he wrote them down, and looked into them to see what they were like. This was very interesting, especially as he had told Montagu, at Easter, 1890, that he had composed “Crossing the Bar” in less than ten minutes.
Then he said again, what I have heard him say before, that though a poet is born, he will not be much of a poet if he is not made too. Then he asked me if I was fond of Pindar. I am very glad that he admires him greatly. He could not believe Paley’s theory that Pindar is earlier than Homer. I vented my dislike of Paley’s horribly prosaic translations in his notes on Aeschylus, and he said he had always used Blomfield, he found his Glossary such a help.
We were now indoors, and in a few minutes went in to luncheon. I was again seated next him, and we had some more talk. He got upon the subject of College life, and told me anecdotes of himself and his friends, one very amusing one about Tom Taylor. During some vacation Tom Taylor’s rooms were lent by the College authorities to a farmer, a member of an Agricultural Society which they were entertaining. Taylor knew this perfectly well; but in the middle of the night suddenly entered the room, in a long traveller’s cloak and with a lantern in his hand, “Pray, what are you doing in my room, sir, and in my bed?” feigning great surprise and indignation. The poor old farmer tried to explain that he was honoured by being the guest of the College, but Taylor refused to be pacified; when suddenly, in the midst of their altercation, enter Charles Spring Rice, brother of Stephen, personating the Senior Dean, who forthwith laid forcible hands on Tom Taylor. Thereupon ensued a regular scuffle, in which they both tumbled on to the bed, and Tom Taylor got so much the worst of it that the kindly agriculturist began to intercede, “Oh, please, Mr. Dean, don’t be too hard on the young man!”
Tennyson himself had been proctorized once or twice. Once, during the first few days of his College life, he came out to receive a parcel by a midnight mail. “Pray, sir, what are you doing at this time of night?” said the Proctor. “And pray, sir, what business of yours is it to ask me?” replied the Freshman, who in his innocence knew nothing about the Proctor. He was told to call upon him next day, but then explained his ignorance, and was let off.
On one occasion a throng of University men outside the Senate House had been yelling against Whewell. Tennyson was standing by the door of Macmillan’s shop, and raised a counter-cry for Whewell. He was, however, seen standing, and was sent for to Whewell. “I was surprised, sir, to see you among that shouting mob the other day.” “I was shouting for you,” was the reply. Whewell was greatly pleased, and grunted his approbation.
Another funny story. A wine-party was going on in Arthur Hallam’s rooms in the New Court, when enter angrily the Senior Dean, “Tommy Thorp.” “What is the meaning, Mr. Hallam, of all this noise?” “I am very sorry, sir,” said Hallam, “we had no idea we were making a noise.” “Well, gentlemen, if you’ll all come down into the Court, you’ll hear what a noise you’re making.” “Perhaps,” admits Tennyson, “I may have put in the all.”
So ends my wife’s short journal, and it only remains for me to sum up very briefly the impressions left upon me, after a lapse of fifty, forty, thirty, twenty years, by these visits to Farringford which once made so large a part of my interest and my happiness.
Little as I am able to put these impressions into words, I can say with truth that no personality with which I have ever come in close touch, either seemed to me at the time, or has seemed in later recollection, to cover so large, so rich, and so diverse a field for veneration, wonder, and regard.
Tennyson was, and is, to me the most remarkable man that I have ever met. Often when I was with him, whether in long walks or in his study, and when I came to think of him silently afterwards, I used to recall his own lines on Wellington:
Our greatest yet with least pretence...,
Rich in saving common-sense,
And, as the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime.
Simple, natural, shrewd, humorous; feeling strongly on a vast variety of subjects, and saying freely just what he felt; passing rapidly and easily from the gravest matters of speculation or conduct to some trifling or amusing incident of the moment, or some recollection of the years of his youth; he seemed to me unconscious of being a great man, though he must have known himself to be one of the foremost thinkers, and quite the foremost poet of his day. He was wholly free from affectation. He was never an actor of a part. There was about him always an atmosphere of truth.
Truth-teller was our Alfred named,
was a line that again and again recurred to the memory as one heard him speak out his mind either on men, or on politics, or on the deepest mysteries of philosophy or religion. He was pre-eminently one of the Children of Light. Of light, whether from science, or from literary criticism, or from the progress of the human conscience, he hailed thankfully and expectantly every fresh disclosure. There was a deep reverence in him for the Unseen, the Undiscovered, the as yet Unrevealed. This on the intellectual side; and on the moral side there was a manly, a devout, and a tender veneration for purity and innocence and trustfulness, and, to borrow his own stately words, written early in his life:
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.
I regret that I cannot convey more worthily what I have felt in the presence of this great and truly noble man. To go to either of his beautiful homes, to see him as the husband of his wife and the father of his sons, was to me and mine for many years a true pilgrimage, both of the mind and of the heart. That I was once able to feel this, and that I am able to feel it gratefully even now, I count among the richer blessings of a long and happy life.