Tennyson and His Friends Part 12

I found a Memorandum the other day (I can't now light on it) of a Lincolns.h.i.+re story about "Haxey Wood" or "Haxey Hood"--which--if I had not told it to you, but left it as by chance in your way some thirty years ago, you would have turned into a shape to outlast all R. B.'s poems put together. There is no use in my finding and sending it now, because it doesn't do (with Paltry Poets) to try and drag them to the water. The two longest and worst tales (I think) in Crabbe's Tales of the Hall, were suggested to him by Sir S. Romilly, and "a lady in Wilts.h.i.+re." I wish Murray would let me make a volume of "Selections from Crabbe"--which I know I could, so that _common_ readers would wish to read the whole original; which now scarce any one does; nor can one wonder they do not. But Crabbe will flourish when R. B. is dead and buried. Lots of lines which he cut out of his MS. would be the beginning of a little fortune to others. I happened on this couplet the other day:

The shapeless purpose of a soul that feels, And half suppresses wrath and half reveals.

Not that Crabbe is to live by single couplets or epigrams, but by something far better, as you know better than I. There is a long pa.s.sage in the Tales of the Hall (Old Bachelor) which always reminds me of you, A. T., where the Old Bachelor recounts how he pleaded with his Whig father to be allowed to marry the Tory Squire's daughter; when,

Coolly my father looked, and much enjoy'd The broken eloquence his eye destroy'd, etc.

and then pleads to the Tory mother of the girl.

Methinks I have the tigress in my eye, etc.

Do look at this, A. T., when you get the Book, and don't let my praise set you against it.

I have written you a very long letter, you see, with one very bad eye too. I thought it had mended, by help of cold water and goggles; but these last three days it has turned rusty again. I believe it misses the sea air.

[Greek: deinon t' aema pneumaton ekoimise[21]

stenonta ponton.]

Do you quite understand this [Greek: ekoimise]? But what lines, understood or not! The two last words go alongside of my little s.h.i.+p with me many a time. Well, Alfred, neither you, nor the Mistress, are to answer this letter, which I still hope may please you, as it is (all the main part) written very loyally, and is all true. Now, good-bye, and remember me as your old

E. F. G.

_Ne cherchez point, Iris, a percer les tenebres[22]

Dont les Dieux sagement ont voile l'Avenir; Et ne consultez point tant de Devins celebres Pour chercher le moment qui doit nous desunir.

Livrez-vous au plaisir; tout le reste est frivole; Et songez que, trop court pour de plus longs projets, Tandis que nous parlons le Temps jaloux s'envole, Et que ce Temps, helas! est perdu pour jamais._

But wait--before I finish I must ask why you a.s.sure Clark of Trinity that it is the _rooks_ who call "Maud, Maud, etc." Indeed it is the _Thrush_, as I have heard a hundred times in a summer's evening, when scared in the evergreens of a garden. Therefore:

Rooks in a cla.s.sroom quarrel up in the tall trees caw'd; But 'twas the thrush in the laurel, that kept crying, Maud, Maud, Maud.

Keats he put very high indeed. "I have been again reading Lord Houghton's _Life of Keats_" he wrote, "whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning, Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are."

"What a fuss the c.o.c.kneys make about Sh.e.l.ley just now, surely not worth Keats' little finger," he wrote on another occasion. And again, "Is Mr.

Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the _Athenaeum_ tells me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets _do_ grow nowadays." And yet again, "I can't read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters, Table-Talk,[23] etc.), whom I try in vain to admire."

His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of "realism" but of reality.

Life's sternest painter and its best--

the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. "I keep reading Crabbe from time to time," he writes to Tennyson; "n.o.body else does unless it be another 'paltry Poet' whom I know. The edition only sells at a s.h.i.+lling a volume--second-hand. I don't wonder at young people and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relis.h.i.+ng even the good parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers."

What he loved before all was "touches of nature," the humour, the pathos, of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and again the outwelling of native n.o.bility, generosity, or love. Newman's early Sermons, "Plain and Parochial" as they were, perhaps for this very reason he much affected. "The best that were ever written in my judgment,"

he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of the _Apologia_ and its "sincerity." But he did not like the ritualism of the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical,--one reason perhaps why he liked Newman. John Wesley was "one of his heroes," and he had much sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and revivalist Mission preaching.

He would have sympathized with Keble's lines teaching that his fellow-creatures should not

Strive to wind themselves too high For sinful man beneath the sky.

This was probably one of the reasons why he did not like "In Memoriam." He said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious artist, both in his verse and in his prose. _Omar_ is most carefully elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of _Euphranor_. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the matter than the form. He did not like the early "Idylls of the King." "The Holy Grail" he liked as he had liked the "Vision of Sin." But what moved him to tears was the old-style "Northern Farmer," the "substantial, rough-spun Nature he knew," and "the old brute, invested by the poet with the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare's _Shallow_." Yet even here a "crotchet" cropped up, as appears from the following note:

WOODBRIDGE, _May 20th, 1877_.

The enclosed sc.r.a.p from Notes and Queries reminded me (as probably the writer has been reminded) of your Old Farmer, the only part of which that goes against me is the "canter and canter away" of the last line.

I can scarce tell you (as usual with me) why I don't like Doctor Fell; but you know I must be right.

By the by, my old Crabbe in the Parish Register (Burials), says

Bless me! I die--and not a warning giv'n-- With much to do on earth, and _all_ for Heaven: No preparation for my soul's affairs, No leave pet.i.tioned for the Barn's repairs, etc.

not very good; and (N.B.) I don't mean it suggested anything in Shakespeare's Northern Farmer--for that may pair off with Shallow.

Again, when it appeared in 1865, he was greatly taken with the "Captain."

It was a return to the old personal mood and simple direct depiction of character:

MARKETHILL, WOODBRIDGE, _October 22nd, 1865_.

DEAR MRS. TENNYSON--Talking of s.h.i.+ps again, I liked much _The Captain_ in the People's Alfred. Was the last stanza (which I like also) an afterthought?--I think a really _sublime_ thing is the end of Kingsley's "Westward Ho!"--(which I never could read through)--The Chase of the s.h.i.+ps: the Hero's being struck blind at the moment of revenge: then his being taken to _see_ his rival and crew at the bottom of the sea. Kingsley is a distressing writer to me: but I must think this (the inspiration of it) of a piece with Homer and the G.o.ds--which you won't at all.

He liked, too, "Gareth and Lynette," which again he thought more natural and direct than some of the earlier Idylls. He liked, as might have been expected, the "Ballads and other Poems." But what is most significant, perhaps, among his likes and dislikes, is his love for "Audley Court,"

"one of my old favourites," he calls it. Why did FitzGerald like "Audley Court"? It is not one of the poems which are generally best known and most admired. Indeed, while it is in many ways beautiful and contains some splendid things, such as the sonorous line

The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores,

it is just one of those poems which the severe critic of Tennyson picks out for fault-finding and even for ridicule. It has what such critics call the over-elaborate, the "drawing-room" manner. Like Milton's picture of Eve's _dejeuner_, though with more humour and appropriateness, it employs the grand and sumptuous style to describe trifles, such as the venison pasty:

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.

But on a closer consideration it will be seen that it has just what "Old Fitz" himself loved--the easy realism, the contentment with the things of this world; above all, that flavour of

After-dinner talk Across the walnuts and the wine

which he also found and loved in that other favourite, "The Miller's Daughter," the harmless gossip about old friends

who was dead, Who married, who was like to be, and how The races went, and who would rent the hall.

This suited "Old Fitz's" temper absolutely. The humorous _pococurantism_, for cynicism it hardly is, of the quatrains put into the mouth of the Poet's friend, each ending "but let me live my life," breathes the very spirit of his own indolent, kindly Epicureanism, and indeed the poem might almost be taken as a record of a dialogue between the two friends in their early days.

He loved, too, the "Lord of Burleigh," "The Vision of Sin," and "The Lady of Shalott." The delicious idealism of these youthful pieces did not displease him. They had for him a "champagne flavour." They were part of his own youth. For a brief hour of that fast-fleeting day, the wine of life had sparkled in his own gla.s.s, but then too soon turned flat and flavourless.

For two or three things every lover of Tennyson must thank FitzGerald. He it was who, about 1838, soon after their friends.h.i.+p began, got his friend, Samuel Laurence, to paint the earliest portrait of the Poet, "the only one of the old days and still the best of all to my thinking," as he wrote in 1871. He, too, preserved and gave to Tennyson the drawing by Thackeray of the "Lord of Burleigh." When the Poet was rather dilatory in calling at Spedding's house to claim this portrait, FitzGerald wrote: "Tell him I don't think Browning would have served me so, and I mean to prefer his poems for the future." He also rescued from the flames some of the pages of the famous "Butcher's Book," the tall, ledger-like MS. volume, in which many of the early poems he so much loved were written, and gave them to the Library of Trinity College. About this he wrote:

MARKETHILL, WOODBRIDGE, _December 4th, 1864_.

DEAR ALFRED--Now I should be almost ready to be "yours ever, etc." if I didn't remember to ask you if you have any objection to my giving two or three of the leaves of your old "Butcher's Book" (do you remember?) to the Library at Trinity College? An admirer of your's there told me they would be glad of some such thing--It was in 1842, when you were printing the two good old volumes:--in Spedding's rooms--and the "Butcher's Book," after its margins serving for pipe-lights, went leaf by leaf into the fire: and I told you I would keep two or three leaves of it as a remembrance. So I took a bit of my old favourite "Audley Court": and a bit of another, I forget which: for I can't lay my hands on them just now. But when I do, I shall give them to Trinity College unless you are strongly opposed. I dare say, however, you would give them the whole MS. of one of your later poems: which probably they would value more.

Tennyson appreciated "Old Fitz's" fine qualities as a critic, but he recognized their limitations, and in particular his "crotchets" and prejudices. He was himself, as is now generally recognized, a consummate critic, and withal a most kindly and catholic one. In my first conversation with him he said that he used to think Goethe a good critic.

"He always discovered all the good he could in a man." To his own contemporaries, especially towards Browning, for example, his att.i.tude was very different, as FitzGerald acknowledged, from FitzGerald's own. I did not like, I remember, to ask him what he thought of Browning, but his son encouraged me to do so. "You ask him," he said. "He'll tell you at once."

At last I did so. "A true genius, but wanting in art," he said. And on another occasion he spoke rather more in detail to the same purpose.

A special friend of both Tennyson and FitzGerald was Thackeray. With him FitzGerald had been intimate even earlier than with Tennyson. They were friends at college, and had gone as young men together to Paris, Thackeray ostensibly to study art. FitzGerald knew Paris of old. His father had a home there when he was a child, and went there for a few months every year for some years.