SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON’S TALK FROM 1835 TO 1853
[Many more were in a Notebook, which I have now lost.—E. F. G.]
By Edward FitzGerald
(Given to Hallam Lord Tennyson[24])
1835
(Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a week from dear Spedding’s Mirehouse at the end of May 1835,—resting on our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, he quoted from the lines he had lately read us from the MS. of “Morte d’Arthur” about the lonely lady of the Lake and Excalibur.)
Nine days she wrought it, sitting all alone
Upon the hidden bases of the Hills.
“Not bad that, Fitz, is it?”
(One summer day looking from Richmond Star and Garter.)
“I love those woods that go triumphing down to the river.”
“Somehow water is the element which I love best of all the four.” (He was passionately fond of the sea and of babbling brooks.—Ed.)
“Some one says that nothing strikes one more on returning from the Continent than the look of our English country towns. Houses not so big, nor such rows of them as abroad; but each house, little or big, distinct from one another, each man’s castle, built according to his own means and fancy, and so indicating the Englishman’s individual humour.
“I have been two days abroad—no further than Boulogne this time, but I am struck as always on returning from France with the look of good sense in the London people.”
(Standing before a Madonna, by Murillo, at the Dulwich Gallery—her eyes fixed on you.)
“Yes—but they seem to look at something beyond—beyond the Actual into Abstraction. I have seen that in a human face.” (I, E. F. G., have seen it in his. Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose it may be so with all Poets.)
1850
“When I was sitting by the banks of Doon—I don’t know why—I wasn’t in the least spoony—not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the Ages)—when all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears.”
“I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins who stood by said there was no one in the two parishes who could do it. I was then about twenty-five.” (He could carry his mother’s pony round the dinner-table.—E. F. G.)
“The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land’s End.” (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)
“Thackeray is the better artist, Dickens the [more affluent] Genius. He, like Hogarth, has the moral sublime sometimes: but not the ideal sublime. Perhaps I seem talking nonsense; I mean Hogarth could not conceive an Apollo or a Jupiter.” (Or Sigismunda.—E. F. G.)—“I think Hogarth greater than Dickens.”
(Looking at an engraving of the Sistine Madonna in which only She and the Child, I think, were represented.)
“Perhaps finer than the whole composition in so far as one’s eyes are more concentrated on the subject. The Child seems to me the furthest result of human art. His attitude is that of a man—his countenance a Jupiter’s—perhaps rather too much so.”
(He afterwards said (1852) that his own little boy, Hallam, explained the expression of Raffaelle’s. He said he thought he had known Raffaelle before he went to Italy—but not Michael Angelo—not only Statues and Frescoes, but some picture (I think) of a Madonna “dragging a ton of a Child over her Shoulder.”)
Seaford: December 27th-28th, 1852
“Babies delight in being moved to and from anything: that is amusement to them. What a Life of Wonder—every object new. This morning he (his own little boy) worshipp’d the Bed-post when a gleam of sunshine lighted on it.”
“I am afraid of him. It is a Man. Babes have an expression of grandeur that children lose. I used to think that the old Painters overdid the Expression and Dignity of their infant Christs: but I see they did not.”
“I was struck at the Duke’s (Wellington’s) Funeral with the look of sober Manhood and Humanity in the British Soldiers.”
(Of Laurence’s chalk drawing of ——’s head—“rather diplomatic than inhuman”—he said in fun.—E. F. G.)
Brighton, 1852-1853
“The finest Sea I have seen is at Valentia (Ireland), without any wind and seemingly without a Wave, but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind it, it dashes up into foam—blue diamond it looked like—all along the rocks—like ghosts playing at Hide and Seek.”
(At some other time on the same subject.)
“When I was in Cornwall it had blown a storm of wind and rain for days—all of a sudden fell into perfect calm; I was a little inland of the cliffs, when, after a space of perfect silence, a long roll of Thunder—from some wave rushing into a cavern, I suppose—came up from the Distance and died away. I never felt Silence like that.”
“This” (looking from Brighton Pier) “is not a grand sea: only an angry curt sea. It seems to shriek as it recoils with its pebbles along the beach.”
“The Earth has light of her own—so has Venus—perhaps all the other Planets—electrical light, or what we call Aurora. The light edge of the dark hemisphere of the moon—the ‘old Moon in the new Moon’s arms.’”
“Nay, they say she has no atmosphere at all.”
(I do not remember when this was said, nor whether I have exactly set it down; therefore must not make A. T. answerable for what he did not say, or for what after-discovery may have caused him to unsay. He had a powerful brain for Physics as for the Ideal. I remember his noticing that the forward-bending horns of some built-up mammal in the British Museum would never force its way through jungle, etc., and I observed on an after-visit that they had been altered accordingly.)
“Sometimes I think Shakespeare’s Sonnets finer than his Plays—which is of course absurd. For it is the knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine.”
“Do you think the Artist ever feels satisfied with his Song? Not with the Whole, I think; but perhaps the expression of parts.”
(Standing one day with him looking at two busts—one of Dante, the other of Goethe, in a London shop, I asked, “What is wanting to make Goethe’s as fine as the other’s?”)
“The Divine.” (“Edel sei der Mensch” was a poem in which he thought he found “The Divine.”—Ed.)
(Taking up and reading some number of Pendennis at my lodging.) “It’s delicious—it’s so mature.”
(Of Richardson’s Clarissa, etc.) “I love those great, still Books.”
“What is it in Dryden? I always feel that he is greater than his works.” (Though he thought much of “Theodore and Honoria,” and quoted emphatically:
More than a mile immerst within the wood.)
“Two of the finest similes in poetry are Milton’s—that of the Fleet hanging in the air (Paradise Lost), and the gunpowder-like ‘So started up in his foul shape the Fiend.’ (Which latter A. T. used to enact with grim humour, from the crouching of the Toad to the Explosion.) Say what you please, I feel certain that Milton after Death shot up into some grim Archangel.” N.B.—He used in earlier days to do the sun coming out from a cloud, and returning into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting of eyes and lips, etc. And, with a great fluffing up of his hair into full wig, and elevation of cravat and collar, George the Fourth in as comical and wonderful a way.
“I could not read through Palmerin of England, nor Amadis of Gaul, or any of those old romances—not even ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ though with so many fine things in it—But all strung together without Art.”
Old Hallam had been speaking of Shakespeare as the greatest of men, etc. A. T. “Well, he was the Man one would have wished to introduce to another Planet as a sample of our kind.”
Àpropos of physical stature, A. T. had been noticing how small Guizot looked beside old Hallam (when he went with Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay over the Houses of Parliament.—Ed.).
“I was skating one day at full swing and came clash against a man of my own stature who was going at the same. We both fell asunder—got up—and laughed. Had we been short men we might have resented.”
(I blamed some one for swearing at the servant girl in a lodging.) “I don’t know if women don’t like it from men: they think it shows Vigour.” (Not that he ever did so himself.)
“There is a want of central dignity about him—he excuses himself, etc.”
“Most great men write terse hands.”
“I like those old Variorum Classics—all the Notes make the Text look precious.”
(Of some dogmatic summary.) “That is the quick decision of a mind that sees half the truth.”