Farringford, where Lord Tennyson dwelt, was near by, and the first time that I saw the poet was on the occasion of our performance of Tom Taylor’s play, Helping Hands, in which I enacted the part of a Jew dealer in musical instruments. As I came upon the little stage I felt almost startled by the great white dome of Tennyson’s head as he sat in the front row of the stalls.
I suppose there was no man of his time in any walk of life whose personal appearance was so striking and impressive. Watts has imaged him well, and Millais too. But there was something in the presence of the man himself that Art could not render, a mingled impression of beauty and dignity, of simplicity and power, which I cannot recall as being combined in equal measure in any other face I have known.
It is a singular fact, not I think generally recognised while they were both living, that there are many elements of resemblance in the features of Tennyson and Charles Dickens. I saw Dickens only once at a reading which he gave in St. James’s Hall, and I was then deeply impressed by the power exhibited in the upper part of the head. But it was not until I was looking one day at a beautiful pencil-drawing which Millais had made of Dickens after death that I perceived the striking resemblance between them—a resemblance that was recognised by Tennyson himself, for while this very drawing, now the property of Mrs. Perugini, was still in Millais’s studio, Tennyson, after he had gazed at it for some time, suddenly exclaimed, “This is the most extraordinary drawing. It is exactly like myself.”
During those early Isle of Wight days Mrs. Cameron would sometimes take us in the evening to Farringford, where Tennyson, if he were in the mood, would read some of his own poems. It was not reading in the ordinary sense, but may more truly be likened to a deep organ chant, and yet it was effective and impressive to an extraordinary degree.
I remember in particular, as he recited one of the songs from the Princess, the splendid cadence of his deep echoing voice as it rose and swelled and sank and fell in almost musical response to the changing mood of the verse:
HEAD OF CHARLES DICKENS
(Taken after death.)
From the pencil-drawing by Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A., in the possession of Mrs. Perugini.
To face page 194.