TENNYSON
DAYS WITH THE POETS

A Day with Tennyson

Painting by E. W. Haslehust.THE BROOK.

A DAY WITH THE POET TENNYSON

·LONDON·
HODDER & STOUGHTON

In the same Series.

Longfellow.
Keats.
Browning
Wordsworth.
Burns.
Scott.
Byron.
Shelley.

A DAY WITH TENNYSON.

TENNYSON was no recluse. He shunned society in the ordinary London sense, but he welcomed kindred spirits to his beautiful home, with large-hearted cordiality. To be acquainted with Farringford was in itself a liberal education. Farringford was an ideal home for a great poet. To begin with, it was somewhat secluded and remote from the world's ways, especially in the early 'fifties, when the Isle of Wight was much more of a terra incognita than traffic now permits. One had to travel down some hundred miles from town, cross from the quaint little New Forest port of Lymington to the still quainter little old-world Yarmouth—"a mediæval Venice," the poet called it—and then drive some miles to Freshwater, before one attained the stately loveliness of Farringford embowered in trees.

The interior of the house—a very ancient one—was no less ideal than its outward aspect, "it was like a charmed palace, with green walks without and speaking walls within." And its occupants crowned all—the ethereally lovely mistress with her "tender spiritual face," and the master, tall, broad-shouldered, and massive, dark-eyed and dark-browed, his voice full of deep organ-tones and delicate inflections, his mind shaped to all fine issues. "The wisest man," said Thackeray, "that ever I knew."

Farringford was the ideal home of the great poet. "A charmed palace with green walks without,"

Painting by E. W. Haslehust.
FARRINGFORD.

Subject to slight inevitable variations, a certain method and routine governed the day of Tennyson. He had definite working-times, indoors and out, and accustomed habits of family life. The morning brought him letters from all parts of England: there was hardly any great man who did not desire to exchange salutations and discuss world-subjects with a thinker so far above the rest. The poet, with the prophetic soul of genius, had always been well in advance of his times.

The daily papers are somewhat late in reaching the Isle of Wight: but the poet could find inspiration even in a source so apparently prosaic as a Times column. He noted down some of those valiant and soul-stirring episodes which go unrecorded save by a passing paragraph: and the poem which, perhaps, has held the public fancy longest, the Charge of the Light Brigade, was written a few minutes after reading the Times' description of the battle containing the phrase "Someone had blundered."

A little while after breakfast, Tennyson would retire to his "den" on the top storey, for that "sacred half-hour" devoted to poetical composition, and assisted by his beloved pipe, during which nobody dared disturb him. This den, or study, formed a setting worthy of its inmate. Every inch of wall was covered with portrait, sketches, drawings. Almost every distinguished name of the nineteenth century was in some manner represented here: the poet literally worked surrounded by his friends. And in this congenial atmosphere he devoted himself to that life-long pursuit of his, as he has imaged it in the "Gleam," which "flying onward, wed to the melody, sang through the world."

Whatever respective values a future generation may set upon Tennyson's work, there can be little doubt that he himself considered the Idylls of the King, with its inner spiritual meanings, as his greatest work. "There is no single fact or incident in the Idylls," he said, "which cannot be explained without any mystery or allegory whatever." Hence their appeal to the least mystical reader, through sheer beauty of language and superb pictorial effect. But at the same time he let it be known that his whole story was inherently one of pure symbolism: starting from the suggestion that Arthur represented conscience. This idea is predominant, without undue insistence upon it, in Guinevere.

Painting by W. H. Margetson.
GUINEVERE.

In the course of the day the poet would devote considerable time and energy to his favourite exercise of garden work. To plant trees and shrubs, to roll the lawn, to dig the kitchen garden, and lovingly to tend the simple flowers which he had set, was his constant delight as long as his strength sufficed. He had a passionate love, and an extraordinary knowledge of Nature: he rejoiced in watching the birds in his great cedar, ilex and fir trees, and his mind was thoroughly attuned to the sweet influences of colour and foliage. Few else could have written that unsurpassable lyric, Come into the Garden, Maud.

The same love of Nature made his eye alert for every obscurest beauty, when he put aside his gardening tools and started, as was his wont, for a stroll with some friend along the glorious cliffs of Freshwater. Those were favoured folk, who, like Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, "walked with Tennyson along High Down, treading the turf, listening to his talk, while the gulls came sideways, flashing their white breasts against the edge of the cliff, and the Poet's cloak flapped time to the gusts of the west wind." This cloak and the Poet were practically synonymous. It figures—a first edition of it—in all the early sketches of him by Spedding, Fitzgerald, etc. (1830-40) and to the last, one can hardly imagine him apart from it.

During these quiet rambles he was wont to discuss with enthusiasm the religious and social problems of the day; they weighed heavily upon his thoughtful mind. His philosophy was a hopeful one, rooted in Christian belief, yet constantly over-shadowed by fugitive misgivings and by a sense of the impermanence of human existence. And while voicing these misgivings in lines which might give pause to weaker minds, he never lost his firm faith in right, in duty, and in ultimate rectification of all apparent wrong.

Painting by W. H. Margetson.
MAUD.

But these mysteries of life and death will not bear too persistent a contemplation: and presently Tennyson, discarding them in favour of less sombre subjects, would regale his hearers with marvellous recitations. "The roll of his great voice acted sometimes almost like an incantation." The old-world classical legends had always found in him a noble exponent; and nowhere was his peculiar felicity of diction and delicate sense of sound better exemplified than in Œnone.

The afternoon was spent, sometimes in further gardening pursuits, sometimes in a drive around the peaceful Island lanes and thatch-browed villages; frequently there were visitors to be met at Yarmouth, where the Tennysons' carriage might often be seen in the quaint cobbled streets. The soft and lovely colouring of the Solent was one to attract the poet's fancy: and it was after coming freshly one day into sight of the familiar waters of the estuary, and a tide, "that moving seems too full for sound or foam," lapping the lichened sea-walls of Yarmouth, that he composed, in his eighty-first year, the verses that he devised to be placed at the end of his whole collected poems:—"Crossing the Bar." The mystic simplicity of these lines strikes the very key-note of his character.

Painting by W. H. Margetson.
SWEET AND LOW.

Tea was served in the drawing-room, "its oriel window full of green and golden lights, of the sounds of birds and of the distant sea." The air of extreme and unstudied simplicity, which dominated the whole Farringford household, was just as noticeable here. Tea was a happy gathering of the family and friends, enlivened with talk on current topics. The Laureate's sympathies were wide-reaching, and his conversation, forcible and often racy, was characterised by the strongest common-sense. He held firmly-defined views on all social subjects; and had declared himself on the question of "Woman's Rights"—then comparatively fresh—at considerable length in The Princess.

The poet's ideal of woman was set very high: he held her to be far above man, morally and spiritually: and an ideal as perfect as may well be conceived was daily before his eyes, in the person of his beautiful wife, with her pure and saintly face: who was yet

Later on in the evening, came, perhaps, the sweetest hour of the day, when, playing and romping with his little ones, the tall and stately man became a very child for a while. A peculiar tenderness towards children was a distinctive feature of Tennyson: and whether helping his own boys build stone castles on the cliff, or frolicking with any village school children whom he might meet, he was intent upon giving that joy and laughter to the new generation which had been denied to his own childhood. "Make the lives of children as beautiful and as happy as possible," was a favourite saying with him. The "Children's Hour," which Longfellow had sung, was a radiant hour for him: and most of all he was enchanted by the sight of little drowsy heads, asleep in cot or cradle. They inspired some of his loveliest lyrics, such as:

And the loss of his first-born infant had touched him with that infinite poignancy of pathos, which breathes in other lines:

The dinner-table was enlivened by Tennyson's boundless store of anecdote, and keen sense of humour. It was a "feast of intellect," to quote Mrs. Cameron; hour after hour of the most brilliant conversation. The supernatural loomed largely. The poet had a penchant for well-authenticated ghost stories, a deep interest in psychical phenomena, and an open mind towards the unknowable. And very strange tales of dreams, clairvoyance, and occult happenings, were to be heard at Farringford. A master of the romantic pervaded by supernatural elements, he had long since drawn with deft touches the mysterious confines of "fäery-lands forlorn," steeped in the very atmosphere of dream.

Painting by W. H. Margetson.
THE LADY OF SHALOTT.

Sitting in his old oak armchair in the drawing-room after dinner, the Laureate "talked of all that was in his heart, or read some poem aloud, with the landscape lying before us like a beautiful picture framed by the dark-arched bow-window. His moods," says Mrs. Bradley, "were so variable, his conversation so earnest, his knowledge of all things so wide and minute!" Wide and minute above all, perhaps, was his acquaintance with Nature. The long quiet years in Lincolnshire had endowed him with an almost unrivalled power of detail: and, as the old Farringford shepherd said in dying, "Master was a wonderful man for nature and life." No one quotation could do justice to his powers: but the lesser music of the countryside tinkles and ripples audibly through The Brook and all the exquisite details of its landscape.

In the course of the evening, the poet would retire to the "den" for a second "sacred half-hour" of unbroken silence, into which we need not follow him. Lastly, when slumber filled the house, and night hung black above the trees, he ascended to a platform on the leads of the house-top, to observe the march and majesty of the stars. Farringford, it has been said, "seemed so remote and still, and as though the jar of the outside world had never entered it." But in the throbbing starlight, the sea purring in the distance, the seer on the roof communing with the mysterious skies above him, it was more than ever a House of Dream—a house whose roof touched heaven. Here and thus were thrilling nocturnes imagined.

And so we leave Alfred Tennyson, at the end of his day, gazing "forward to the starry track glimmering up the height beyond," alone with the Creator.

while the discords of earth are hushed beneath the magic of the spheral harmony, and "The Gleam" hovers upward into heaven.

Printed by Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd., Bradford and London.