“How are you this morning, Irving?” he inquired anxiously.
“Very well indeed,” was his guest’s reply.
“Are you?” came the response, with just a tinge of doubt in the tones of the voice. “You drank a lot of port last night.”
I think Tennyson’s was essentially a simple nature. Certainly in his own home he gave me that impression. His high qualities as a poet, and the unerring refinement of taste that is stamped on almost every line of his verse, seemed never to have disturbed or effaced a primitive strength of character that had its roots deep in the soil. And yet he was quickly sensitive to criticism, and would sometimes take no pains to hide his wounds.
At our last meeting he openly expressed his vexation at an unfavourable article that had then recently appeared. He questioned me closely as to what I thought could have been the motive of the writer, who for the rest was not of such a rank that his censure need have disturbed the poet’s equanimity. “What harm have I ever done to him?” he exclaimed, in tones that seemed to me at the time almost child-like in reproach. But it is, as I have come to think, a sure hall-mark of genius that its weakness is very often frankly avowed. It is a part of that inward candour that makes for greatness, the petty price that we have to pay for the larger and nobler revelation. Lesser spirits can often contrive to hide their littleness, but in the greatest it is nearly always carelessly confessed.
Tennyson’s simplicity would sometimes find vent in almost boyish frolic. One evening at Farringford he was suddenly seized with the idea that he would like to dress up one of Mrs. Cameron’s nieces in the garb of a man. He got one of his own long coats from the hall, and with a burnt cork himself disfigured her pretty face, daubing upon it a heavy black moustache and imperial, and then retreating to the other side of the room to gaze with manifest delight upon the result of his own handiwork.
The primitive side of Tennyson’s nature was aptly mirrored in the person of his brother Horatio, who, by reason of certain well-considered peculiarities of dress, was often mistaken by visitors to Freshwater for the poet himself. The attention thus attracted to him he contrived to endure with complacency; indeed, I think he was partly conscious that he served in this way as a sort of buffer between his greater brother and the prying curiosity of the crowd which the poet himself deeply resented.
Horatio Tennyson would often accompany Harry Cameron and myself when we wandered over the downs with a gun in search of sea-gulls, or scoured the neighbouring farms for rabbits. His mind, I think, moved slowly, and there was sometimes a strong bucolic flavour in the stories he loved to relate.
Another constant companion on these rambling excursions was poor Lionel Tennyson, the poet’s younger son, who afterwards married Frederick Locker’s daughter. Locker himself I came to know later in the days of the Grosvenor Gallery. I think few men have been endowed with a surer and more delicate taste in all matters pertaining to Art. We met in sympathy over the drawings by the old masters, of which he possessed a few of the very choicest examples. It was, indeed, his unfailing characteristic as a collector that all he had was of the best. And his personality, very winning in its simplicity and refinement, responded aptly enough to the qualities of his mind.
In conversation he would sometimes leap with quaint abruptness of thought from the most abstract to the most concrete things, from the appreciation of a drawing by Leonardo to the sudden consideration of the price of coals. Du Maurier’s pen-and-ink drawing of him may be said to rank as the most perfect of portraits—an exact image of the man himself in form and feature.