TENNYSON, CLOUGH, AND THE CLASSICS
By Henry Graham Dakyns
You ask me to write a little paper for you on my reminiscences of Farringford, the Pyrenees, and, later, Aldworth; and, although I am still beset by something of the old horror of biography which so obsessed me when I had the chance that I religiously abstained from taking notes at the time, I cannot refuse the opportunity you offer me of having my say also about your father and mother, and certain others whose friendship was and is so precious to me in its affection, and their image ineffaceable. To your cairn of memories I wish to add my pebble. I might seem lacking in affection otherwise, and that would be to do myself an injustice, and yourselves, your father and mother, an injury, that of seeming insensible to their true worth. Semper ego auditor tantum? Nunquamne reponam?
This then is, if somewhat meagre, a faithful record of what I recollect. To avoid repetition and for reverence’ sake, I shall speak of Lord and Lady Tennyson as Him and Her, and of yourselves, my two pupils, by your names. If I have occasion to mention myself (your old tutor), I will use the symbol Δ, the first letter of Δακυνίδιον, which, being interpreted, is “Little Dakyns,” by which name your father spoke of me, at least on one occasion.
Tennyson and his two Sons. By Julia Margaret Cameron.
My first Introduction to her and the two Boys, and presently to him, at Farringford, March (?) 1861
I shall never forget the beauty of the scene—I wish I could actualize it—and it was accompanied by what appealed not only to the eye, but to the heart, a mysterious sense of at-homeness. Your mother, as I think I have often told you, was seated half-reclining on the sofa which stood with its back to the window, with that wonderful view of capes and sea beyond. And you two stood leaning against her, one on either side. She was, and always remained, supremely beautiful, not only in feature and the bodily frame, but still more from the look in her eyes, the motion of her lips, and the deep clear music of her voice. Such a combination of grace and dignity with simplicity and frankness and friendliness of accost as never was. Such gentle trustfulness and sincerity of welcome as must have won a less susceptible heart than that of the diffidently intrusive παιδαγωγὸς Δ. I thought she must be a queen who had stept down from mediæval days into these more prosaic times which she ennobled. And the two Boys. If I cannot speak about them to you, you will guess the reason. But for the benefit of a younger generation, I appeal to the portraits of her by Watts (now at Aldworth), and of Hallam and Lionel—surely among the best he ever painted—which are given in your father’s Memoir (vol. i. facing p. 330 and p. 370).
And then he came in, a truly awful[49] moment, but in an instant of time he too had not only banished the nervousness of Δ, but won his heart. His welcome resembled hers in its sincerity. And even if I had been ten times more nervous than I was, and awe-stricken I was, no doubt, something set me at my ease at once. Of his look and manner I find it not only hard, but absurd to attempt to speak. He must have been at that date somewhat over fifty. I was twenty-three, not quite thirty years younger.[50] His figure, so well known in the photographs of the time, was imposing, and it was awe-inspiring to be in the presence of the great Poet we had hero-worshipped in our youth (though he, I think, was not the only divinity in our Pantheon, there was Clough also—Browning at that date had not appeared). But even so formidable as he was on these grounds, the humanity of the man, and what I came to regard as the most abiding, perhaps the deepest-seated, characteristic, his eternal youthfulness, acted as a spell, and timidity melted into affection. I can still feel his hand-grip, soft at once and large and strong, as he stood there peering down on the relatively small mortal before him—so sane, and warm, and trustful.
As to his so-called gruffness of manner, I will speak about that later on, but I want at once to make clear a certain quality of mind which I believe helped things, so that he was not troubled by the presence of a stranger, either then or when Δ was no longer a stranger, ever afterwards. I suppose if there had been any occasion for comparing notes he might have discovered much to object to in my attitude to the universe, especially during my turbulent youth, but we had much in common, he in his great grand way illimitably, and I in my tentative fashion diminutively. The quality I refer to as a bond was a heartfelt detestation on Δ’s part of what I venture to call the pseudo-biographic mania. The notion of collecting tiny pinhead facts, or words actually spoken but separated from their context: the idea of collecting these and calling the result biography I loathed. So when I found, as I did at once, that the great man, the poet, and the equally great woman his wife, held similar views, I applauded myself and became more and more rigidly unbiographic. Of course, I see now that Δ was possibly over-scrupulous. Instead of depending on mere recollection, how much more sensible, and not a whit the less reverential, it would have been to have taken down at many a conversation some catchword of what he said, and his remarks were apt to be as incisive as they were laconic. And the Poet’s fore-ordained biographer would have blessed the inspiration. Would Tennyson himself have been equally pleased? I am not so sure. But what he really deprecated was after all only the vulgar tales of the spurious biographer. “In life the owls—at death the ghouls.”
With this apology I come to some among the dicta current in my time. I think it was the first night I happened to use the word “knowledge,” pronouncing it as I had been brought up to do with the ō long, whereupon he complimented me.[51] “You say ‘knōwledge,’” and explained that “knŏwledge” to rhyme with “college” was the only permissible exception. I felt pleased with my domestic training. Then he went on to denounce a solecism, the use of “like” with a verb, “like he did,” instead of “as he did,” and humorously he begged me to correct any one guilty of such barbarism, a pledge I undertook, and acted up to, correcting speakers right and left till it came to the superior clergy, bishops, and so forth, in the pulpit; then I desisted....
But to proceed. Apropos of Voltaire saying that to listen to English people talking was to overhear the hissing of serpents, he commented, “and to listen to German was to overhear k’s like the scrunching of egg-shells.” He had two or three pithy sayings, which came straight home to me and became part of my mental furniture, so much so that I have at times given myself the credit of innovating them. One of these was that the defect of most people—not critics only, but others, la foule in general—is “to impute themselves.” I felt this to be at the root of the matter, a profound if humorous extension of the wise man’s saw, πάντων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος. He said it often and most seriously. The other I might call the “elogium vatis” par excellence. It took the form of a caution against “mixing up things that differ,” and to this also among his sententiae I assented quod latius patet. I think I once used it incidentally to him, and he at once pulled me up. “That’s mine.” He certainly did so when I asked him his own riddle: “My first’s a kind of butter, my second’s a kind of liquor, and my whole’s a kind of charger.” Answer: “Ramrod.” And he exclaimed, “That’s my riddle.”[52] Then there is the old story how the Englishman, wishing to direct the garçon not to let the fire go out, gently growled, “Ne permettez pas sortir le fou,” whereupon the garçon locks up the other Englishman. I think it was brought up by Frank Lushington as now told against the Poet, and Tennyson gave us the correct version; originally he had invented it himself of Edmund Lushington when they were in Paris, chaffing his friend’s French. But it was a case of biter bit. In the vulgar version I find the Poet with his long hair is made to play the part of the fou. Thus far these trifles. I come to memorabilia more precious to me and of larger import. I will head the section
Tennyson and the Classics, English and Other,
and it is what you asked for. And let me make two preliminary remarks. In reference to the defect of self-imputation above mentioned, I wish to point out to any, consciously or unconsciously, critically minded person, that the striking thing to me was the wide sympathy, the catholicity of the Poet’s mind, his width of view. Thus he—I will not use the word “displayed,” as if it were an external habit of any sort—but simply and naturally he had ingrained in him the greatest generosity in his feeling for, in his criticism of, contemporary authors. And this applies to his appreciation of the great classical authors of the past. I do not say, of course, that he had not his favourites, as we all have, especially, perhaps, the smaller we are. For instance—and here other of his contemporaries, Clough, Jowett, etc., would have borne him out—his appreciation of Δ’s favourite poet Shelley was not so spontaneous nor, I venture to think, so profound as, let us say, his appreciation of Wordsworth (whom he also “criticized”[53]) or Victor Hugo, or, to take an opposite instance, his ready appreciation of Walt Whitman, or of Browning, or possibly of Clough. But all this is admirably discussed in your Memoir.[54] I only wish to add my testimony, and I take as my text a saying of his about Goethe, which I seem to recollect if I recollect rightly: “In his smaller poems, e.g. those in Wilhelm Meister, Goethe shows himself to be one of the great artists of the world. He is also a great critic, yet he always said the best he could of an author. Good critics are rarer than good authors” (cp. his own “And the critic’s rarer still”).[55]
And I must further premise that the samples given of quotations from the Classics are from the particular ones he chanced upon—the artist in him, perhaps, instinctively selecting—for the particular youth, and what he needed, or because they fitted on to things on which his mind was working at that date. Here, at all events, they are, or some of them. I omit continual references to Shakespeare, to Dante, to Virgil, to Homer. He was perpetually quoting Homer and Virgil, and to my mind there was nothing for grandeur of sound like his pronunciation of Latin and Greek as he recited whole passages or single lines in illustration of some point, of metre, perhaps, or thought, or feeling; for instance, the line from Homer:
βῆ δ᾽ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης,
commenting on the possibility of pronouncing οι not in our English fashion like oy in boy, but like the German ö—o of “wood”—phlösböo—imitating the lisping whisper of the tideless Mediterranean on a soft summer day. Then how he rolled out his Virgil, giving first the thunder, then the wash of the sea in these lines:
Fluctus ut in medio coepit quum albescere ponto
Longius, ex altoque sinum trahit; utque volutus
Ad terras immane sonat per saxa, neque ipso
Monte minor procumbit; at ima exaestuat unda
Verticibus, nigramque alte subiectat arenam.
He used to say, “The Horatian alcaic is, perhaps, the stateliest metre except the Virgilian hexameter at its best.”
I take my samples in chance order. I suppose I knew my Catullus fairly well before, but I am sure that, in a deeper sense, I learnt to know “the tenderest of Roman poets” for the first time that day when he read to me in that voice of his, with half-sad Heiterkeit, and with that refinement of pronunciation which seemed—I am sure was—the right thing absolutely, those well-known poems about his lady-love’s pet sparrow (translated roughly here in case a reader should chance not to know Latin):
Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
Quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
Cui primum digitum dare appetenti
Et acris solet incitare morsus,
Cum desiderio meo nitenti
Carum nescio quid libet iocari.
Credo ut, cum gravis acquiescet ardor,
Tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
Et tristis animi levare curas!
Sparrow, pet of my lady-love, with you she will play; she will hold you in her bosom and give you her finger-tips to peck at, and tease to quicken your sharp bite, when my shining heart’s desire is in the humour for some darling jest. Doubtless, when the fever of passion dies away she seeks to find some little solace[56] for her pain. Oh, if I could only play with you as she does, and so relieve the gloomy sorrow of my soul!
And then the tear-moving sequel in the minor:
Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque,
Et quantum est hominum venustiorum.
Passer mortuus est meae puellae,
Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
Quem plus illa oculis suis amabat;
Nam mellitus erat suamque norat
Ipsam tam bene quam puella matrem,
Nec sese a gremio illius movebat,
Sed circumsiliens modo huc modo illuc
Ad solam dominam usque pipillabat.
Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.
At vobis male sit, malae tenebrae
Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis:
Tam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis.
Vae factum male! Vae miselle passer!
Tua nunc opera meae puellae
Flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli.
Mourn, all ye Goddesses of Love, and all ye Cupids mourn: mourn, all ye sons of men that know what love is. My lady’s sparrow is dead, dead; her sparrow, my lady’s pet, whom she loved more than her own eyes, for he was honey-sweet, and knew his own mistress as well as any girl her mother; nor would he stir from his lady’s bosom, but hopping about, now here, now there, he piped his little treble to her and her alone. But now he goes along the darksome road, to that place whence they say no one returns. Ah, my curse upon you! Cursed shades of Orcus, that devour all things beautiful! So beautiful a sparrow have ye taken from me! Alas for the ill deed done! Alas, poor little[57] sparrow! Now, because of you my lady’s dear eyes are swollen, they are red with weeping.
The tenderness of his voice when he came to the eleventh and twelfth lines, and the measured outburst of passionate imprecation, come back almost audibly. I wish I could reproduce the pathos. But in the poem he next read to me, the tenderness of Catullus and his perfection of form reach, I think, a climax. So I think he felt, he who so revived his manner in “Frater Ave atque Vale,” and his reading gave me that impression. I refer to the passionate poem:
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
Rumoresque senium severiorum
Omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.[58]
Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
Deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
Dein, quum millia multa fecerimus,
Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
Aut nequis malus invidere possit,
Cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.
Let us live, my Lesbia, live and love; and, as for the slanderous tongues of greybeards, value them all at a farthing’s worth. Suns may set and suns may rise again, but for us, when our short day has ended, one long night comes, a night of sleep that knows no ending. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, and then another thousand and a second hundred, and then once more a thousand and again a hundred, on and on. And then, when we have made up many thousands, we will overturn the reckoning that we may not know the number, nor any villain cast an evil eye on us, though he discover all that huge amount of kisses.
Can’t you overhear his voice? Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, deep-toned and fast, like a pent-up stream in spate, bursting its barriers, till the tale is told.
Two other poems of Catullus I must mention. The first of these he had much on his mind, for he was just then in the mood for experiments on metre, and the famous poem “Boädicea” was, I think, the first of these,[59] echoing the galliambics of Catullus in the “Attis”:
Super alta vectus Attis celeri rate maria.
How far his own metre corresponds to Catullus’ is a question for experts like Bridges, Mayor, R. C. Trevelyan, etc., to determine, but I heard him more than once read first the Attis poem and then his “Boädicea,” and I thought at the time there was an extraordinary resemblance in rhythm. He wished that the “Boädicea” were musically annotated, so that it might be read with proper quantity and pace.
The last of the Catullus poems I want to refer to he never read to me as a whole. It is the lovely Epithalamium in honour of Junia and Manlius, calling on Hymenaeus to attend and bless the marriage:
Collis o Heliconii
Cultor, Uraniae genus,
Qui rapis teneram ad virum
Virginem, o Hymenaee Hymen,
O Hymen Hymenaee!
Dweller on the mount of Helicon,
Seed of the Heavenly One,
Thou that bearest off the tender maiden to her bridegroom,
O Hymenaean Hymen,
O Hymen Hymenaean!
I do not know if he ever read it as a whole to any one. It would have been splendid to hear, but towards the end of the long poem, where the poet, like Spenser, prays, “Send us the timely fruit of this same marriage night,” comes a verse he was very fond of quoting, and in particular the third line:
Torquatus volo parvulus
Matris a gremio suae
Porrigens teneras manus
Dulce rideat ad patrem
Semhiante labello.
I want a baby-boy Torquatus to stretch out his little hands from his mother’s lap, and sweetly to smile upon his father with half-opened lips.
These, I think, were the most remarkable of the Catullus poems he showed me, though of course there were others. I come now to the kindred Greek genius, who had a special fascination for him, the poetess Sappho. He loved her Sapphics, and greatly disliked the Sapphics of Horace, “with their little tightly curled pigtails.” I believe I owe it to him that I am a worshipper of that most marvellous muse of Sappho....
[Editorial Note.—Unhappily Mr. Dakyns never completed his paper. For, while still engaged on it, he died suddenly, June 21, 1911. A friend, Miss F. M. Stawell, has added the following notes from recollections of what Mr. Dakyns said or wrote to her on the subject.]
Mr. Dakyns’s manuscript breaks off abruptly, but he left some headings for what he intended to write: Sappho, Goethe, Béranger, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Life at Farringford, The French Tour and Clough, Clough and the Pyrenees. I think he would have quoted first from Sappho the lines beginning:
οἷον τὸ γλυκυμᾶλον ἐρεύθεται ἀκρῷ ἐπ᾽ ὐσδῷ
Like the sweet apple that reddens upon the topmost bough,
for he loved the passage, and the book was left open at this page.
No doubt he would have gone on to quote others that were favourites both with the Poet and with himself. Such as the heart-sick cry of love:
δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα
καὶ Πληιάδες, μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὥρα,
ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.
The moon has set, the Pleiades have gone;
Midnight! The hour has past, and I
Sleep here alone.
Or again:
γλυκεῖα μᾶτερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἱστόν,
πόθῳ δαμεῖσα παιδὸς βραδινὰν δι᾽ ᾽Αφροδίταν
Dear mother mine, I cannot weave my web—
My heart is sick with longing for my dear,
Through Aphrodite fair.
And he would probably have included that longer poem of passion which has been the wonder of the world, that invocation to
Starry-throned, immortal Aphrodite.
ποικιλόθρον᾽, ἀθάνατ᾽ ᾽Αφροδίτα.
Mr. Dakyns did not tell me himself what he had learnt of Simonides from Tennyson, but Tennyson quoted the following poems to his eldest son, Hallam. The sad, comforting, beautiful chant of Danaë to her baby, afloat on the waters, was quoted in one of Mr. Dakyns’s last letters to me, when his mind was full of his unfinished article. He wrote: “Isn’t that lovely and tear-drawing? true and tender and sempiternal?” And then he copied out the whole song, in case I should chance not to have the text at hand, with J. A. Symonds’s translation beside it:
ὅτε λάρνακι ἐν δαιδαλέᾳ
ἄνεμός τέ μιν πνέων κινηθεῖσά τε λίμνα
δείματι ἤριπεν, οὔτ᾽ ἀδιάντοισι παρειαῖς,
ἀμφί τε Περσέϊ βάλλε φίλην χεῖρα,
εἶπέ τ᾽· ὦ τέκος, οἷον ἔχω πόνον.
σὺ δ᾽ ἀωτεῖς, γαλαθηνῷ τ᾽ ἤτορι κνώσσεις ἐν ἀτερπεῖ
δούρατι χαλκεογόμθῳ,
νυκτὶ ἀλαμπεῖ κυανέῳ τε δνόφῳ σταλείς·
ἅλμαν δ᾽ ὕπερθε τεᾶν κομᾶν βαθειᾶν
παριόντος κύματος οὐκ ἀλέγεις,
οὐδ᾽ ἀνέμου φθόγγον,
πορφυρέᾳ κείμενος ἐν χλανίδι, καλὸν πρόσωπον.
εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν,
καί κεν ἐμῶν ῥημάτων λεπτὸν ὑπεῖχες οὖας.
κέλομαι δ᾽, εὗδε βρέφος, εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος,
εὑδέτω δ᾽ ἄμετρον κακόν·
μεταιβολία δέ τις φανείη, Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἐκ σέο·
ὅτι δὲ θαρσάλεον ἔπος
εὔχομαι νόσφιν δίκας, συγγνῶθί μοι.
When in the carven chest
The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest
Smote her with fear, she not with cheeks unwet
Her arms of love round Perseus set,
And said: “O child, what grief is mine!
But thou dost slumber, and thy baby breast
Is sunk in rest.
Here in the cheerless, brass-bound bark,
Tossed amid starless night and pitchy dark,
Nor dost thou heed the scudding brine
Of waves that wash above thy curls so deep,
Nor the shrill winds that sweep—
Lapped in thy purple robe’s embrace
Fair little face!
But if this dread were dreadful, too, to thee,
Then would’st thou lend thy listening ear to me;
Therefore I cry, Sleep, babe, and sea be still,
And slumber our unmeasured ill!
Oh, may some change of fate, sire Zeus, from Thee
Descend our woes to end!
But if this prayer, too overbold, offends
Thy justice,—yet be merciful to me.
It was natural also that the heroic poems of Simonides should have appealed to both men, and of special interest to know the delight that Tennyson took in one of these, and perhaps because of the similarity shown by his own splendid lines in the “Duke of Wellington” Ode:
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro’ the long gorge to the far light has won
His path upward, and prevail’d,
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun.
ἔστι τις λόγος
τὰν ἀρέταν ναίειν δυσανβάτοις ἐπὶ πέτραις·
ἁγνὰν δέ μιν θεὰν χῶρον ἁγνὸν ἀμφέπειν.
οὐδὲ πάντων βλεφάροις θνατῶν ἔσοπτος,
ῳ μὴ δακέθυμος ἱδρῶς
ἔνδοθεν μόλῃ, ἵκῃ τ᾽ ἐς ἄκρον
ἀνδρείας.
There is a tale
That Valour dwells above the craggy peaks
Hard, hard to scale,
A goddess pure in a pure land, and none
May see her face,
Save those who by keen Toil and sweat have won
That highest place,
That goal of manhood.
And with these heroic lines go the others on the men who fell at Thermopylae:
τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων
εὐκλεὴς μὲν ἁ τύχα, καλὸς δ᾽ ὁ πότμος,
βωμὸς δ᾽ ὁ τάφος, πρὸ γόων δὲ μνᾶστις, ὁ δ᾽ οἶκτος ἔπαινος·
ἐντάφιον δὲ τοιοῦτον οὔτ᾽ εὐρὼς
οὔθ᾽ ὁ πανδαμάτωρ ἀμαυρώσει χρόνος.
ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ὅδε σακὸς οἰκέταν εὐδοξίαν
‘Ελλάδος εἵλετο· μαρτυρεῖ δὲ Λεωνίδας,
ὁ Σπάρτας βασιλεύς, ἀρετᾶς μέγαν λελοιπὼς
κόσμον ἀέναόν τε κλέος.
Of those who fell at far Thermopylae,
Fair is the fate and high the destiny:
Their tomb an altar, memory for tears
And praise for lamentation through the years.
On such a monument comes no decay,
And Time that conquers all takes not away
Their greatness: for this holy Sepulchre
Of valiant men has called to dwell with her
The glory of all Greece. Bear witness, Sparta’s king,
Leonidas! thy ever-flowing spring
Of fame and the high beauty of thy deed!
There is a kindred note echoing through the popular catch in praise of the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, one of the first bits of Greek that Tennyson made his sons learn:
ἐν μύρτου κλαδὶ τὸ ξίφος φορήσω,
ὥσπερ ‘Αρμόδιος καὶ ᾽Αριστογείτων,
ὅτε τὸν τύραννον κτανέτην
ἰσονόμους τ᾽ ᾽Αθήνας ἐποιησάτην.
In myrtle I wreathe my sword
As they wreathed it, the brave,
Brave Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
When they slew the oppressor, the lord,
And to Athens her freedom gave.
Mr. Dakyns must have rejoiced in a spirit that could feed boys on such gallant stuff as this.
From Goethe he would have selected the noble proem to Faust:
Ihr naht Euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,
for there was a note among his papers to that effect.
And there is one note about Béranger (written in a letter):
It was he too who introduced me to Béranger, e.g. “Le Roi d’Yvetot,” and the refrain:
Toute l’aristocratie à la lanterne![60]
And how he read it! Like the Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus of Catullus quoted above—with fire and fury, tauriformis Aufidus-like—a refrain which, like the “Marseillaise,” stirred my republican spirit νόσφιν δίκας, inordinately, I mean, and in a monstrous cruel sort of way: but what he liked was the form and force of the language, the pure art and horror of it, I imagine.
Mr. Dakyns, in the short time I knew him, often spoke to me about Tennyson, and always with stress on “the width of his humanity,” and how he could appreciate works at which a smaller man might have been shocked; how, for example, he sympathized with the inmost spirit of Hugo’s cry to the awful vastness of God:
Je sais que vous avez bien autre chose à faire
Que de nous plaindre tous;
saw nothing irreverent in it, as lesser critics have done; found in it rather a fortifying quality against “the grief that saps the mind.” “I wish you could have heard him read it,” he wrote afterwards, “in his organ-voice.” Once he said to me how much he had wanted Tennyson to write the Ode on the Stars which was always floating before his mind: “He could have done it, for he had the sense of vastness. And it would have been a far finer work than the ‘Idylls of the King.’”
Tennyson also, he told me, was the first man to tell him about Walt Whitman, and the first passage he showed him was one of the most daring Whitman ever wrote. On his side Whitman had a deep feeling for Tennyson and used to write of him affectionately as “the Boss,” a touch that pleased Mr. Dakyns greatly, for he admired and loved Walt. He gave me a vivid impression of Tennyson’s large-heartedness in all kinds of ways: for instance, his own opinions were always intensely democratic, and the Tennysons sympathized rather with the old Whig and Unionist policy, but he said it never made any difference or any jar between them. “I remember his coming into my little study at the top of the house and finding me absorbed in Shelley, and asking me what I was reading, and I was struck at the time by the quiet satisfied way in which he took my answer, no cavil or criticism, though I knew he did not feel about Shelley as I did.... I don’t know how to give in writing the true impression of his dear genial nature. It often came out in what might seem like roughnesses when they were written down. He was very fond of Clough: and Clough at that time was very taciturn—he was ill really, near his death—and I remember once at a discussion on metre Clough would not say one word, and at last Tennyson turned to him with affectionate impatience, quoting Shakespeare in his deep, kindly voice, ‘Well, goodman Dull, what do you say?’ How can I put that down? I can’t give the sweet humorous tone that made the charm of it. And then people called him ‘gruff.’ His ‘gruffness’ only gripped one closer.”
Another time he told me with keen enjoyment of Tennyson’s discovering a likeness to him in some drawing on the cover of the old Cornhill—I think it was the figure of a lad ploughing—pointing to it like a child and saying, “Little Dakyns.” He would speak with delight of Tennyson’s humour, far deeper and wilder, he said, than most people would have guessed, Rabelaisian even in the noble sense of the word, and always fresh and pure.
“I remember an instance of my own audacity,” he said, “at which I almost shudder now. We were riding into a French town, it was the evening of a fête, and the whole population seemed to be capering about with the most preposterous antics. It struck a jarring note, and the Poet said to me, ‘I can’t understand them, it’s enough to make one weep.’ Somehow I couldn’t help answering—but can you imagine the audacity? I assure you I trembled myself as I did so—‘Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.’ And he took it, he took it! He did indeed!”
The memories of Clough also were very dear to Mr. Dakyns, and he said he could never help regretting that he had not heard him read his last long work, “In Mari Magno,” to the Poet. “Tennyson said to me afterwards, ‘Clough’s Muse has lost none of her power,’ and I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt that I had not been asked to hear the reading: perhaps it was vanity on my part.”
Clough always came down to see them bathe. He was very fond of bathing himself, but could not take part in it then on account of his health. “I never feel the water go down my back now,” Mr. Dakyns said, “without thinking of Clough.”
But the sweetest of all the memories was, I think, the memory of the valley at Cauteretz, sacred to Tennyson because of Arthur Hallam. I heard Mr. Dakyns speak of that the first time he was at our house. My mother chanced to ask him what he did after taking his degree, and he said, “I was with the Tennysons as tutor to their boys, and we went to the Pyrenees.” The name and something in his tone made me start. “Oh,” I said, “were you with them at Cauteretz?” He turned to me with his smile, “Yes, I was, and if I had not already a family motto of which I am very proud, I should take for my legend ‘Dakyns isn’t a fool’” (the last phrase in a gruffly tender voice). And then he told us: “There was a fairly large party of us, the Tennysons, Clough, and myself, some walking and some driving. Tennyson walked, and I being the young man of the company, was the great man’s walking-stick. When we came to the valley—I knew it was a sacred place—I dropped behind to let him go through it alone. Clough told me afterwards I had done well. He had noticed it, and the Poet said—and it was quite enough—‘Dakyns isn’t a fool!’”
It was that evening that Tennyson wrote “All along the Valley.”