In giving some account of Clevedon, I would tell how my own interest in the subject of this little work has drawn forth the friendly notice of one who fully participates in all the enthusiasm and admiration that In Memoriam can excite.
Edward Malan, himself a fine scholar and son of a most scholarly father, has greatly assisted me, especially with classical illustrations of the text; and as he visited Clevedon before I went there, and has described Hallam’s burial-place so appreciatively, I shall freely use his words when I come to that part of my subject.
How the friendship came about which has found such undying record in this Poem, is soon told. Alfred Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam met, as undergraduates, at Trinity College, Cambridge, about the year 1828. Tennyson, born in 1809, was the older by one year and a half. Both these young men were inheritors of remarkable ability—the one being a son of the distinguished historian, and the other a son of an accomplished divine—both, too, were themselves highly educated, and one at least was possessed of the highest genius. Their friendship was not founded on a common participation in the ordinary interests of youth, but they sympathized in poetical temperament and philosophical taste. The mental stature of Hallam, and his pure and beautiful disposition in their college life, are recalled by the Poet in many places, but especially in Poems cix. and following.
In 1829, the two friends competed for the Chancellor’s gold medal for the English Prize Poem, the subject being “Timbuctoo,” and Tennyson gained it. This College intimacy was continued at both their homes, and Hallam became engaged in marriage to one of Tennyson’s sisters. This alliance may have deepened the attachment of the friends; but was not needed to account for the survivor writing of the departed as “more than my brothers are to me.”
Arthur Hallam took his degree at Cambridge in January, 1832, and then lived with his father in London; having been entered on the boards of the Inner Temple, as a student of Law. At the beginning of August, 1833, they went a short tour into Germany, and, in returning to Vienna from Pesth, a wet day caused a slight attack of intermittent fever in Arthur, which was apparently subsiding, when a sudden rush of blood to the head put an instantaneous end to his life, on the 15th September, 1833.
A subsequent “examination showed a weakness of the cerebral vessels, and a want of sufficient energy in the heart.” Mr. Hallam adds this sad tribute to his son’s memory: “Those whose eyes must long be dim with tears, and whose hopes on this side the tomb are broken down for ever, may cling, as well as they can, to the poor consolation of believing that a few more years would, in the usual chances of humanity, have severed the frail union of his graceful and manly form, with the pure spirit it enshrined. The remains of Arthur were brought to England, and interred on the 3rd January, 1834, in the chancel[5] of Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, belonging to his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton; a place selected not only from the connexion of kindred, but on account of its still and sequestered situation, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel.”
My friend, Edward Malan, gives the following graphic account of his visit to Hallam’s grave—
“The chief attraction for visitors to Clevedon is the obscure and solitary parish church of St. Andrew, where the great historian and his eldest son, Arthur Hallam, are interred. You seek it by the beach and through the fields, and you find it at last, an old and lonely church beside the sea, in a hollow between two green headlands. The path up to it, bordered with ash trees and hawthorns, winds along the side of Church Hill, the first of the two headlands, which shuts it from view until, rounding a green shoulder, you come suddenly upon it, like a ghost. Even then, unless you have brought a mind in harmony, there is little to see, for the spot is so deserted and so lifeless that you seem to have stepped back through centuries, and to be moving in some old-world time. A weird sensation creeps over you, gazing on the ivy and wall-rue, and the path trodden by cottagers—a feeling akin to awe, which reminds you somehow of the poems of Ossian. You are in the presence of these three grey sisters, grey thought, grey silence, grey repose: only clouds, like a troop of mourners, hurrying up over the waste, only a solemn dirge as the wind sweeps wailing by, only the low faint murmur of the sea. The sun’s last beams are on the distant hills, and the tide is ebbing dim and shadowy to the shadowy ocean beyond.
“Inside, the church is old and dim, and filled with a faint odour of age. As the wind rises, mysterious pulses of sound awaken in the rafters overhead. The monuments of the Hallams are not in the chancel, but they are in the manor aisle affixed to the western wall. There are four of them, Arthur Hallam’s being one of the two centre tombs.
“A new organ now stands on the vault. The familiar names—familiar, that is, in the classical sense—are those of the Elton family, Hallam’s relations. A memorial brass near at hand bears the name of Hallam’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. Sir Abraham Charles Elton, fifth baronet, together with the names of the four preceding baronets; and a marble tablet, close to the site of the old family pew, records the death by drowning of Hallam’s two cousins, Abraham and Charles, in 1819, at Weston-super-Mare, when Hallam himself was eight years old. This unhappy occurrence has been commemorated by their father in an elegy entitled The Brothers. The moon, when high in the heavens (24 Dec. 1882), strikes through the south window of the aisle, slanting-wise on the monuments of the dead.”