Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

The first to pass away was my father, and as his best friend walked in the garden at Swainston on the day, May 31, 1870, on which he came to see him laid to rest, he made those verses,[81] than which few lovelier tributes were ever paid from friend to friend, and which will keep the name of the “Prince of Courtesy” green even in the long years to come.

The autumn and winter ’71-’72 my eldest brother and I spent together at Freshwater. We rented Mrs. Cameron’s little house which opens by a door of communication into the large hall of Dimbola, the house in which she lived. The evening we arrived, she suddenly appeared in our drawing-room saying, “When strangers take this house I keep the door between us locked, with friends never”; and locked it never was. We lived almost as part of the family, and it was a real enjoyment to be in such close intimacy with one of the most original, and at the same time most tender-hearted and generous women I have ever known. She was on very intimate terms at Farringford, and would speak her mind to the Poet in a very amusing way. On one occasion a party of Americans came to Freshwater, and Mrs. Cameron sent them up to Farringford with a note of introduction. Tennyson was tired or busy, and they were not admitted. They returned to Mrs. Cameron full of their disappointment, and she put on her bonnet (I can see her now as she walked through the lanes, her red or blue Chuddah shawl always trailing behind her, and apparently not much the worse for the dust that fringed it), and insisted upon their going back with her to Farringford. Having made her way to Tennyson, she said to him solemnly, “Alfred, these good people have come 3000 miles to see a lion and they have found a bear.” He laughed, relented, and received the strangers most courteously.

Mrs. Cameron’s beautiful white-haired old husband in his royal purple dressing-gown was a most interesting personality. In addition to the large experience of men and things which his many years of official life in India had given him, and which made his society delightful, he was a very fine classical scholar of the old school, and in his old age, when blindness and infirmity debarred him in great measure from his books, it was his solace to repeat by heart odes of Horace, pages of Virgil, and long passages from the Greek poets.

Easter 1872 brought a bright and merry gathering to Freshwater. One of Mrs. Cameron’s charming relations (they had lived with her for years as adopted daughters) was about to marry, and go out with her husband to India, and the “Primrose wedding” brought a large influx of young people, friends and relations of Mrs. Cameron and the bride, in addition to the visitors who always made Easter a pleasant time. The weather was perfect, the “April airs that fan the Isle of Wight” especially soft and balmy. Parties of twenty or thirty met every evening in Mrs. Cameron’s hall or in the Farringford drawing-room. Nearly every one there knew or got to know Lord and Lady Tennyson. He was in particularly genial health and spirits; he joined the young people in their midnight walks to the sea, in their flower-seeking expeditions, in one of which some one was fortunate enough to find a grape hyacinth in one of the Farringford fields. He read aloud nearly as much as he was asked to, and danced as vigorously as the youngest present at two dances that were given. It was during the first of these dances that a young neighbour became engaged to the lady whom he shortly afterwards married. Very soon after the decisive moment had passed, and when the event was naturally supposed to be a profound secret, Tennyson put the girl’s mother, with whom he happened to be sitting, completely out of countenance by saying, without a suspicion of malice, and without for the moment recognizing the young couple who passed him, “I wot they be two lovyers dear.” When he was shortly afterwards told of the engagement, he twinkled very much over his rather premature but very apposite announcement.

My marriage took place in the autumn of 1872, and my husband, who already knew the Tennysons, was at once received into their intimacy, and their friendship was henceforth one of the greatest privileges of our joint life. Tennyson and Hallam were present at our wedding, and the former held our eldest boy in his arms when he was but a day or two old.

The Easter of 1873 saw us again at Freshwater with another pleasant meeting of friends. On that occasion Tennyson said to me, “Why do you not ask me to dinner?” It need not be said that we at once gave the invitation, though not a little nervous at the thought of the lodging-house fare and arrangements to which we were bidding him; but our dear old landlady did her very best. We asked a small party (Lady Florence Herbert and Leslie Stephen were our guests) to meet him and Hallam; he was himself in the best of spirits, and our little dinner-party proved a great success.

A few years later the Tennysons took a house in London three or four years running (one spring they had my stepmother’s house in Eaton Place). Tennyson appeared to have in great measure lost his dislike to mixing in general society, and they collected about them a very interesting and varied circle of friends. I cannot help recalling an incident which occurred one evening at their house, which, though painful at the moment, is pleasant to look back upon on account of the affectionate and generous apology it elicited. A large party was at their house one evening, and Tennyson was persuaded to read aloud, and chose the “Revenge.” Something or other, I suppose the “Inquisition Dogs” and the “Devildoms of Spain,” excited him as he read, and by the time he had finished he had worked himself into a state, which I have occasionally, but seldom, seen at other times, of fury against the Catholic Church, as exemplified by the Inquisition, persecution of heretics, etc.; in fact, all the artillery of prejudice at which Catholics can afford to laugh. It happened, however, that my husband, one of my sisters, and myself were the only Catholics there, and were sitting together in the same part of the room. As he talked he turned towards us and addressed us personally in a violent tirade which loyalty to our convictions made it impossible for us not to answer, though our attempts at explanation and contradiction were drowned in his fierce and eloquent denunciations. Every one in the room looked very uncomfortable. I myself hardly knew whether to laugh or cry, and was never more relieved than, when his flow of words had exhausted itself, he began to read another poem. Before the end of the evening, however, he felt that his outbreak had not been kind or courteous, and before we left he took us all three into his study, and made so sweet and gracious an amende that we loved him, if possible, more than ever.

Any one who has read carefully the “Idylls of the King,” “Sir Galahad,” “St. Agnes,” among many of his poems, still more any one who has spoken with him intimately, cannot fail to realize the strong attraction which many Catholic doctrines and practices had for Tennyson, and the reverence with which he regarded the Catholic Church as standing alone among jarring sects and creeds, majestic, venerable, and invulnerable. His mind was also an essentially and intensely religious one, and I know that one of my father’s attractions for him lay in the religious tone of his mind. On these points, however, I will say no more. In jotting down these few remembrances of a friendship which is amongst my most precious possessions, I settled with myself to refrain entirely from any presentation of what I believed to be Tennyson’s views on theology, metaphysics, or politics, no less than from any discussion of his poetic greatness. I want nothing but to sketch the man as he always seemed to me, one of the noblest, truest, and most lovable of God’s creatures, and one who, even without the genius that has crowned his brow with never-fading laurel, must, by weight of character and beauty of soul alone, stand a giant amid his fellow-men!

We spent the Christmas holidays of 1890-91 at Freshwater with our five children; not one of them will forget the delightful intercourse with Farringford during those weeks, and the Christmas Tree arranged by Mrs. Hallam Tennyson for her little Lionel in the large room known as the ball-room.[82] Kind words and presents were showered on every one, and I think the beloved grandparents enjoyed it as much as their fourteen-months-old grandson, as they sat in the midst of their servants and cottagers (some of whom were amongst the oldest of their friends), and the guests, little and great, whom they had asked to share their Christmas festival. Our two eldest children have a more precious remembrance of that time and the following Easter, which we also spent at Freshwater, for Tennyson read aloud to them for the first and only time. To our girl he read “Old Roä” and the “Bugle Song,” and to our boy the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.” He read this in April 1891; it was the last time I heard him read, and I look upon it as a special act of kindness; he said he did not like to read to children—they did not understand, were bored—and he only yielded to my strong entreaties. If, however, he saw, as I think he did, the flushed cheeks and big tearful eyes of our fourteen-year-old schoolboy, he must have felt that he had a listener who did understand and appreciate!

Through the early part of the winter of 1890 Tennyson was remarkably well, walking in the morning with my husband and other friends, and taking long walks in the afternoon up and down the ball-room, when he liked to have one or two companions who would amuse him, and whom he would amuse with witty stories and bons mots. He had always a great pleasure in racy anecdotes, and the humorous side of life, and during the last years this increased, so that his friends treasured up every good story they heard to repeat to him at their next meeting.