By Wilfrid Ward
Among Tennyson’s friends in his later years was my father—William George Ward—who was his neighbour at Freshwater from 1870 to 1882. I have been asked to contribute to the picture of “Tennyson and his Friends” some account of their intercourse, and at the same time to set down some of the extremely interesting comments on his own poems which I myself was privileged yet later to hear from the Poet. I need not say that such an act of piety in regard of two men for whom I have so deep a reverence is a work of love, and I only regret that my recollections of what so well deserves recording should be so imperfect and fragmentary.
Tennyson’s friendship with my father began at a date considerably subsequent to their first acquaintance. My father came rather unexpectedly into the family property in the Isle of Wight in 1849 when his uncle died without a son; but he did not desire to leave the house Pugin had built for him in Hertfordshire, where he had settled immediately after he joined the Catholic Church in 1845. He and the late Cardinal Vaughan were, in the ’fifties, doing a work for ecclesiastical education at St. Edmund’s College, Ware—a work which came to my father naturally as the sequel to his share in the Oxford Movement. Therefore, when Tennyson in 1853 came to live in the Isle of Wight my father was an absentee. He tried in 1858 for two years to live at his grandfather’s old home near Cowes, Northwood Park, but his health broke down, and he returned to Hertfordshire. In the ’sixties, however, he used to pay long visits to Freshwater, in the scenery of which he delighted; and, on one of these occasions, Tennyson was introduced to him by their common friend, Dean Bradley. The meeting was not, I think, a great success on either side. Later on, however, in 1870, when my father, despairing of the Cowes climate, built a house at Freshwater, he was Tennyson’s near neighbour, and they soon became great friends.
Arthur Tennyson.
Tennyson’s friendship with my father grew up from close neighbourhood, and from the fact that they had so much more in common with each other than with most of their other Isle of Wight neighbours. It was cemented by my father’s devotion to Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Tennyson, who, in her conversation, he always said, reminded him of the John Henry Newman of Oxford days. Also they had many friends in common—such as Dean Stanley, Lord Selborne, and Jowett—who often visited Freshwater. They were both members of the Metaphysical Society, and loved to discuss in private problems of religious faith which formed the subject of the Society’s debates. They were also both great Shakespearians. But most of all they were drawn together by a simplicity and directness of mind, in which, I think, they had few rivals—if I may say of my own father what every one else said. Nevertheless, their intimacy was almost as remarkable for diversity of interests as for similarity. It might seem at first sight to be a point of similarity between them that each revelled in his way in the scenery of the beautiful island which was their home. Yet the love of external nature was very different in the two men. It had that marked contrast which Ruskin has described in his Modern Painters. Ruskin contrasts three typical ways of being affected by what is beautiful. There is first “the man who perceives rightly because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose—a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.”
My father’s imagination was of the second order, Tennyson’s of the third. My father often perceived wrongly, or not at all, because he felt so strongly. Consequently, while the bold outlines of mountain scenery and the large vistas of sea and down in the Isle of Wight moved him greatly, he did not look at them with the accurate eye of an artist; and the minute beauty of flowers and trees was non-existent for him. Tennyson, on the contrary, had the most delicate and true perception of the minute as well as the great. Each man chose for his home a site which suited his taste. Weston was on a high hill with a wide view. Farringford was lower down and buried in trees. The two men used sometimes to walk together on the great Down which stretches from the Needles rocks to Freshwater Bay, on which the boundary between Tennyson’s property and my father’s is marked by the dyke beyond the Tennyson memorial cross. At other times they walked in the Freshwater lanes. And there was a suggestion in these different surroundings of their sympathy and of their difference. The immense expanse of scenery visible from the Beacon Down was equally inspiring to both, but the lanes and fields which were full of inspiration to Tennyson had nothing in them which appealed to W. G. Ward. If he heard a bird singing, the only suggestion it conveyed to him was of a tiresome being who kept him awake at night. Trees were only the unpleasant screens which stood in the way of the view of the Solent from his house, and which he cut down as fast as they grew up. To Tennyson, on the contrary—as we see constantly in his poetry—there was a whole world of interest in Nature created by his knowledge of botany and natural history, as well as by his exceptionally accurate and observant eye.
Let me quote the words of a great critic—the late Mr. Hutton—on this characteristic of the Poet:
No poet has so many and such accurate references to the vegetable world, and yet at the same time references so thoroughly poetic. He calls dark hair
More black than ash-buds in the front of March;