Tennyson and His Friends Part 1

Tennyson and His Friends.

by Various.

PREFACE

To those who have contributed to this volume their memories of my father, criticisms of his work, or records of his friends, I owe a deep debt of grat.i.tude. Three of the writers, Henry Butcher, Sir Alfred Lyall, and Graham Dakyns, have lately, to my great loss, pa.s.sed away--into that fuller "light of friends.h.i.+p"--

"a clearer day Than our poor twilight dawn on earth."

TENNYSON.

TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS

JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER

(DEDICATION OF "THE DEATH OF NONE" TO EMILY, LADY TENNYSON)

There on the top of the down, The wild heather round me and over me June's high blue, When I look'd at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown, I thought to myself I would offer this book to you, This, and my love together, To you that are seventy-seven, With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, And a fancy as summer-new As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Emily Lady Tennyson from a drawing by G. F. Watts, R.A._

_Emery Walker, Ph.sc._]

RECOLLECTIONS OF MY EARLY LIFE

By EMILY, LADY TENNYSON

Written for her son in 1896

You ask me to tell you something of my life before marriage at Horncastle in Lincolns.h.i.+re. It would be hard indeed not to do anything you ask of me if within my power. To say the truth, this particular thing you want is somewhat painful. The first thing I remember of my father[1] is his looking at me with sad eyes after my mother's[2] death. Her I recollect, pa.s.sing the window in a velvet pelisse, and then in a white shawl on the sofa, and then crowned with roses--beautiful in death. I recollect, too, being carried to her funeral; but I asked what they were doing, and in all this had no idea of death.

My life before marriage was in many ways sad: in one, however, unspeakably happy. No one could have had a better father, or been happier with her two sisters, Anne and Louisa. Although, if we were too merry and noisy in the mornings, we were summoned by my Aunt Betsy (who lived with us) all three into her room, to hold out our small hands for stripes from a certain little riding-whip; or if, later in the day, our needlework was not well done we had our fingers p.r.i.c.ked with a needle, or if the lessons were not finished, we had fools' caps put on our heads, and were banished to a corner of the room. My aunt's nature was by no means cruel; she was, on the whole, kind and dutiful to us, yet no doubt with effort on her part, for she had no instinctive love of children.

Among our neighbours we had as friends the Tennysons, the Rawnsleys, the Bellinghams, and the Ma.s.singberds. The death of my cousin, Mr. Cracroft, was among my early tragedies. He had been on public business at Lincoln: and on his return to Horncastle, was seized at our house with Asiatic cholera, a solitary case, which proved fatal. Ourselves and his daughters heard of it in a strange way. We were in a tent at a sheep-shearing, the great rustic festival of that day. A village boy came into our tent, and swarmed up the pole, saying to us, "I know something; your father is dead." We hurried home, and we, three sisters, were put by my aunt (to keep us quiet) to the hitherto-unwonted task of stoning raisins. This made me so indignant that I threw my raisins over the edge of the bowl, and forthwith my aunt caught me up, and--so rough was the treatment of children then--banged my head against the door of our old wainscoted rooms, until I called out for my father, crying aloud, "Murder"; when he rushed in and saved me.

My next memory of my father is his giving me Latin lessons; and at this time I somehow came across a copy of _Cymbeline_, which I read with great delight. Then we had our first riding-lessons. I well recall my dislike of riding, when my pony was fastened to a circus stake, which I had to go round and round. Unfortunately, much as my father wished it, I never became a good horsewoman. He himself was so good a rider, when all the gentlemen of the county were volunteers, that he could ride horses which no one else could ride--so my grandmother would tell me with pride--adding, "Your father and his brother (both six foot three) were the handsomest men among them all." At that time he kept guard with his fellow-volunteers over the French prisoners, who, he said, were always cheerful and always singing their patriotic songs.

But to return to my sisters and myself. For exercise we generally took long walks in the country, and I remember that when staying at my father's house in Berks.h.i.+re[3] we often used to wander up to a tower among our woods where a gaunt old lady lived, called Black Jane, who told our fortunes. We had our favourite theatricals, too, like other children. Our dramatic performances were frequent, and our plays were, some of them, drawn from Miss Edgeworth's tales. I was always fond of music, and used to sing duets with my soldier cousin, Richard Sellwood.

At eight years old I was sent, with my sisters, to some ladies for daily lessons, and later to schools in Brighton and London, for my father disliked having a governess in the house. So, much as he objected to young girls being sent from home, school in our case seemed the lesser evil. My sisters liked school; to me it was dreadful. As soon as I reached the Brighton seminary, I remember that for weeks I appeared to be in a horrible dream, and the voices of the mistresses and the girls around me seemed to be all thin, like voices from the grave. I could not be happy away from my father, who was my idol, though after a while I grew more accustomed to the strange life. My father would never let us go the long, cold journey at Christmas time from Brighton to Horncastle, but came up to town for the vacation, and took us for treats to the National Gallery, and other places of interest. Great was the joy, when the summer holidays arrived, and after travelling by coach through the day and night, we three sisters saw Whittlesea-mere gleaming under the sunrise. It seemed as if we were within sight of home.

When I was eighteen, my Aunt Betsy left us to live by herself alone. We spent rather recluse lives, but we were perfectly happy, my father reading to us every evening from about half-past eight to ten, the hour at which we had family prayers. Most delightful were the readings; for instance, all of Gibbon that could be read to us, Macaulay's _Essays_, Sir Walter Scott's novels. For my private reading he gave me Dante, Ariosto, and Ta.s.so, Moliere, Racine, Corneille. Later I read Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter; and for English--Pearson, Paley's _Translation of the Early Fathers_, Coleridge's works, Wordsworth, and of course Milton and Shakespeare. We had walks and drives and music and needlework. Now and again we dined in the neighbourhood, and some of the neighbours dined with us; and once a year my father asked all the legal luminaries of Horncastle to dinner with him.

Before my sister Louy married your Uncle Charles (Tennyson-Turner) in 1836, my cousin, Catherine Franklin, daughter of Sir Willingham Franklin, took up her abode with us, and we had several dances at our house. Two fancy-dress dances I well remember. Louy and I disliked visiting in London and in country-houses, and so we always refused, and sent Anne in our stead. My first ball, I thought an opening of the great portals of the world, and I looked forward to it almost with awe. It is rather curious that at one of my very few b.a.l.l.s, Mr. Musters (Jack Musters his intimates called him), who married Byron's Mary Chaworth, should have asked for, and obtained, an introduction to me.

In 1842 came Catherine's marriage to our true friend, Drummond Rawnsley, the parson of the Rawnsley family; and then my sister Anne married Charles Weld. After this my father and I lived together alone. The only change we had from our routine life was a journey, one summer, to Tours, with Anne and Charles Weld, and his brother Isaac Weld, the accomplished owner of Ravenswell, near Bray, in Ireland.

At your father's home, Somersby, we used to have evenings of music and singing. Your Aunt Mary played on the harp as her father used to do. She was a splendid-looking girl, and would have made a beautiful picture. Then your Aunt Emily (beloved of Arthur Hallam) had wonderful eyes--depths on depths they seemed to have--and a fine profile. "Testa Romana" an old Italian said of her. She had more of the colouring of the South, inherited, perhaps, from a member of Madame de Maintenon's family who married one of the Tennysons. Your father had also the same kind of colouring. All, brothers and sisters, were fair to see. Your father was kingly, ma.s.ses of fine, wavy hair, very dark, with a pervading shade of gold, and long, as it was then worn. His manner was kind, simple, and dignified, with plenty of sportiveness flas.h.i.+ng out from time to time.

During my ten years' separation from him the doctors believed I was going into a consumption, and the Lincolns.h.i.+re climate was p.r.o.nounced to be too cold for me; and we moved to London, to look for a home in the south of England. We found one at last at Hale near Farnham, which was called by your father "my paradise." The recollection of this delightful country made me persuade your father eventually to build a house near Haslemere.

We were married on June 13, 1850, at s.h.i.+plake on the Thames.

TENNYSON AND LINCOLNs.h.i.+RE

By WILLINGHAM RAWNSLEY

I

TENNYSON'S COUNTRY

Calm and deep peace on this high wold, And on these dews that drench the furze, And all the silvery gossamers That twinkle into green and gold.

Calm and still light on yon great plain That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main.

Lincolns.h.i.+re is a big county, measuring seventy-five miles by forty-five, but it is perhaps the least well known of all the counties of England. The traveller by the Great Northern main line pa.s.ses through but a small portion of its south-western fringe near Grantham; and if he goes along the eastern side from Peterborough to Grimsby or Hull, he gains no insight into the picturesque parts of the county, for the line takes him over the rich flat fenlands with their black vegetable mould devoid of any kind of stone or pebble, and intersected by those innumerable d.y.k.es or drains varying from 8 to 80 feet across, which give the southern division of Lincolns.h.i.+re an aspect in harmony with its Batavian name "the parts of Holland."

The Queen of this flat fertile plain is Boston, with her wonderful church-tower and lantern 280 feet high, a marvel of symmetry when you are near it, and visible for more than twenty miles in all directions. Owing to its slender height it seems, from a distance, to stand up like a tall thick mast or tree-trunk, and is hence known to all the countryside as "Boston stump."

At this town, the East Lincolns.h.i.+re line divides: one section goes to the left to Lincoln; the other, following the bend of the coast at about seven miles' distance from the sea, turns when opposite Skegness and runs, at right angles to its former course, to Louth,--Louth whose beautiful church spire was painted by Turner in his picture of "The Horse Fair."

The more recent Louth-to-Lincoln line completes the fourth side of a square having Boston, Burgh, Louth, and Lincoln for its corners, which contains the fairest portion of the Lincolns.h.i.+re wolds, and within this square is Somersby, Tennyson's birthplace and early home. It is a tiny village surrounded by low green hills; and close at hand, here nestling in a leafy hollow, and there standing boldly on the "ridged wold," are some half a dozen churches built of the local "greensand" rock, from whose towers the Poet in his boyhood heard:

The Christmas bells from hill to hill Answer each other in the mist--

the mist which lay athwart those "long gray fields at night," and marked the course of the beloved Somersby brook.

If we go past the little gray church with its perfect specimen of a pre-Reformation cross hard by the porch, and past the modest house almost opposite, which was for over thirty years the home of the Tennysons, we shall come at once to the point where the road dips to a little wood through which runs the rivulet so lovingly described by the Poet when he was leaving the home of his youth:

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea Thy tribute wave deliver: No more by thee my steps shall be, For ever and for ever.

and again: