Tennyson and His Friends Part 31

We often talked of Farrar's book and Maurice's opinions on Eternal Punishment. The Poet was fond of quoting Dante's line:

Fecemi somma Sapienza ed il sommo Amore,

insisting on Dante's intense belief in a G.o.d of Love. He more than once repeated the famous lines of Moschus,[70] adding, "I think those the finest lines in all Greek antiquity."

_T._ "My friend, Sir Henry Taylor, on being called a Christian Jupiter, remarked, 'I wish I was much more of a jovial Christian.'"

_T._ "I once asked Rogers, 'Did you ever write a sonnet?' He answered, 'No, I never dance in fetters.'"

_T._ "I am told that the best prose version of the _Odyssey_ is by Professor Palmer of Cambridge University, America. Since Matthew Arnold's lectures on Homer, a new translation has appeared annually in that country. It would take me ten years to translate the _Iliad_ into Bible English." He liked Worsley's translation of the _Odyssey_.

"The purest English is talked in South Lincolnshire. The dialect begins at Spilsby in Mid-Lincolnshire, and that is the dialect of my Lincolnshire poems."

He was fond of telling Lincolnshire stories. _T._ "An old farmer, at the time when railways were beginning, receiving a visit from the parson, moved uneasily in his bed, crying out, 'What with faath, and what with real bad harvests, and what with them graat, horrid steam-kettles, and what with the soon goin' raound the earth, and the earth goin' raound the soon, as soom saay she do, I am clean maazed an' the sooner I gits out of this 'ere world, the better;' and he turned his face to the wall and died."

I close my chapter of fragments and echoes still abiding with me; men privileged as I was can hear the voice and hate a gramophone. My aim has been to show the everyday life, the plain unvarnished words which were the daily change with the first man of his age and a rank-and-file acquaintance just able, and no more, to appreciate such kindness.

_Haec olim meminisse iuvabit._

MUSIC, TENNYSON, AND JOACHIM

By SIR CHARLES STANFORD

My acquaintance, or rather my friendship, with Alfred Tennyson (for he had an all-compelling power of making real friends of, and being a true friend to, those far junior to himself) dated only from 1879, when he was in years seventy, but in mental vigour the contemporary of the youngest man he happened to be with. Previously, however, in 1875, I had had experience of his thoughtful kindness. He had chosen me, an unknown and untried composer, to write the incidental music to his tragedy of "Queen Mary" for its production at the Lyceum Theatre, then under the management of Mrs.

Bateman. Many difficulties were put in the way of the performance of the music, into the causes of which I had neither the wish nor the means to penetrate. Finally, however, the management gave as an explanation that the music could not be performed, as the number of orchestral players required for its proper presentment would necessitate the sacrifice of two rows of stalls. To my young and disappointed soul came the news of a generous action which would have been a source of pride to many a composer of a.s.sured position and fame. The Poet had offered, unknown to me, to bear the expense of the sacrificed seats for many nights, in order to allow my small share of the work to be heard. The offer was refused, but the generous action remains--one amongst the thousands of such quiet and stealthy kindnesses which came as second nature to him, and were probably as speedily forgotten by himself as they were lastingly remembered by their recipients.[71]

He little knew that, when I was in my early 'teens and had the most absurdly exaggerated notions of my song-writing powers, I had had the presumption to ask my cousin, Mr. Stephen Spring Rice, if he would induce his old friend to send me a MS. poem to set. Happily, I only got a kindly but necessary rap over the knuckles for my impertinence; the request was consigned to the waste-paper basket and mercifully never reached Farringford. I tremble now to recall the incident, although I verily believe that if Mr. Spring Rice had been cruel enough to send my letter on, the smile which it must have provoked would in no wise have been a contemptuous one. I can imagine his saying then, what I have often heard him say in later days, "Maxima debetur pueris reverentia." I had seen so much of Aubrey de Vere all through my boyhood that I almost felt as if I knew Tennyson too, so vivid were his accounts of him, and his descriptions of his ways and surroundings.

Joachim also, who all through the British part of his international career was in close touch with the Tennyson circle, used often to speak of him with the deep reverence and whole-hearted enthusiasm which he reserved for a very few. On the staircase at Farringford hangs Mrs. Cameron's early (and still unsurpa.s.sed) photograph of the great violinist. My host pointed at it one day as he pa.s.sed upstairs: "That's Joachim. He's a fine fellow.

Why did he cover up that fine jowl with a beard?"--quite forgetful of the possible retort that he had committed the same wickedness himself. On the comparatively rare occasions when he came up to London, and was surrounded by all the stars in the literary and political firmament, Joachim and his Stradivarius were as brilliant a centre of attraction as any of his guests. Joachim's setting of Merlin's song in "The Coming of Arthur" was an especial favourite of his, as both in atmosphere and in declamation it exactly fulfilled the intention of his verse. Joachim once told me that he always had great hankerings after setting "The Revenge," but that he repressed them because he felt that it could only be tackled in the true English spirit by a Britisher.

The clue to Tennyson's great critical power in declamation was obvious to any one who heard him recite his own work. His manner of reading poetry has often been described. It was a chant rather than a declamation. A voice of deep and penetrating power, varied only by alteration of note and by intensity of quality. The notes were few, and he rarely read on more than two, except at the cadence of a pa.s.sage, when the voice would slightly fall. He often accompanied his reading by gentle rippling gestures with his fingers. As a rule he adhered more to the quant.i.ty of a line than the ordinary reciter, for he had the rare gift of making the accent felt, without perceptibly altering the prosody. Without being a musician, he had a great appreciation of the fitness of music to its subjects, and was an unfailing judge of musical declamation. As he expressed it himself, he disliked music which went up when it ought to go down, and went down when it ought to go up. I never knew him wrong in his suggestions on this point. The most vivid instance I can recall was about a line in "The Revenge":

Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew.

When I played him my setting, the word "devil" was set to a higher note in the question than it was in the answer, and the penultimate word "they"

was unaccented. He at once corrected me, saying that the second word "devil" must be higher and stronger than the first, and the "they" must be marked. He was perfectly right, and I altered it accordingly. It was apparently a small point, but it was this insisting on perfection of detail which made him the most valuable teacher of accurate declamation that it was possible for a composer to learn from. Of all his poems which I heard him read, those he made most impressive were "The Revenge" and the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington." It may be interesting to record a point in the latter which, he said, was often misread. The line

Let the bell be toll'd,

he read with strong emphasis upon the first as well as the third and fifth words:

- u - u -

not

u u - u -

He said it wanted three strokes of the bell, not two. "Maud" he also read with a most extraordinary warmth and charm, particularly the climax of "Come into the garden," and still more the stanza about the sh.e.l.l (Part II.), which he gave in a peculiarly thin and ghostly tone of voice, a quality he also used with great mastery in the Choric Song of the "Lotus Eaters." Nor was he less impressive when reciting Greek or German. Greek he vastly preferred as p.r.o.nounced in the English fashion. He said it lost all its sonority and grandeur if modernized; and, indeed, to hear his ill.u.s.tration was in itself sufficient to convince. German he p.r.o.nounced with a strong English accent, and yet I feel sure that Goethe himself would have acknowledged his reading of "Kennst du das Land" to be a masterpiece. He was a great admirer of Goethe, and especially of this poem. He only disliked one line--

O mein Beschutzer, ziehn,

of which he said, "How could Goethe break one's teeth with those z's, while the rest is so musical?" Curiously enough, it is now known that Goethe erased "Beschutzer" and subst.i.tuted "Geliebter." He once read to me from his works for nearly half an hour.

He was extremely particular about clear diction in singing, the lack of which in the majority of singers of his day was far more marked than it is nowadays. He intuitively grasped the true basis of that most difficult of tasks, the composing of a good song which is at once practical and grateful to sing. He knew that the poem should be the key to the work, and should be so clearly enunciated that every word can reach the listener; and that the composer must never over-balance the voice with the ill.u.s.trative detail of the accompaniment. When I was setting "The Voyage of the Maeldune" I happened to be at Freshwater; and after finishing the solo quartet, "The Under-sea Isle," four amateurs sang it through for him.

His only (and I fear very just) comment on the performance was, "I did not hear a word you said from beginning to end." But he thought afterwards that we might feel somewhat crushed, and as I was going away some little time later, and was pa.s.sing his door, he put his head out and said with a humorous smile, "I'm afraid I was rather rude just now, but I liked the way your music rippled away when they fall into the water." This was a most curious instance of his faculty for recognizing a subtle piece of musical characterization as rapidly as, and often more rapidly than, a listener who was fully equipped with musical technique.

His ear was capable of such fine distinctions of vowel quality, that it has always been a mystery to me why this gift, so highly developed in him, did not bring a mastery of music in its train. By one of the odd dispensations of nature, Robert Browning, who had none of this fineness of ear, knew enough of music to be able even to read it from a score with his eyes. Such words as "true" and "too," which in most people's mouths have an identical vowel sound, were differentiated by him, the "oo" full and round, the "ue" inclining imperceptibly to "u." His "a" also had far more varied colours than is usual even with singers. One modification in especial, the quality of which can best be described as approaching that of "_Eh_, mon," in broad Scotch, gave a breadth and a dignity to such words as "Nation," "Lamentation," "Pageant" (he never used the horrible p.r.o.nunciation "Padgent"), which added vastly to the musical values of his verse. It is this perfection of vowel balance which makes his poetry so difficult to set to music satisfactorily. So musical is it in itself that very little is left for actual music to supply. It is often the very incompleteness of some poetry which makes it suggestive to a composer, the qualities lacking in the one calling out for the a.s.sistance of the other to supply them, a condition of combination which Wagner deliberately carried to a fine art in his double capacity of poet and composer. With Tennyson there is no gap to fill, and all that music can do is to ill.u.s.trate the surrounding atmosphere, and to leave the poetry to tell its own story with its declamation and inflections accurately preserved.

The best reproduction of the peculiar quality of Tennyson's reading which I have heard was Irving's rendering of the lines about the bird in the last act of "Becket":

We came upon A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still, I reach'd my hand and touch'd; she did not stir; The snow had frozen round her, and she sat Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs.

The mastery of sound-painting in this line, the chilly "o's" and "e's"

which the Poet knew so well how to place, Irving declaimed with a quiet reverence which made the sentence so pathetic that it will always live in the memory of those who heard it. It is interesting to record that all the actors I have met who witnessed the play invariably hit on those lines as the high-water mark of Irving's powers.

The rehearsals of "Becket," many of which I was privileged to witness, soon made it clear that Irving's Becket was going to be, as it eventually proved to be, the finest both in conception and in accomplishment of all his creations. The part fitted him like a glove. So completely did he live in it, that a friend of his (who related his experience to me), who went round to see him after a performance, was dismissed by him on leaving with a fervent benediction delivered with up-raised hand, so sincerely and impressively delivered that he positively seemed to be an actual Prince of the Church.

With Irving's arrangement of the play I never wholly agreed. He made of it as a whole a workable piece, but in doing so he sacrificed one scene which, beyond all question, is one of the most vivid and most characteristic in the play, the scene of the beggars' feast. He lost sight of the fact that its omission spoilt the balance of the middle section.

There was no foil to the brilliancy of the Council at Northampton.

Tennyson (like Shakespeare) knew better the value of contrast, and put in at this point that touch of divine humour which only heightens pathos. The drama needed it. He balanced the traitorous splendour of the n.o.bles with the homely loyalty of the halt, maimed, and blind. Irving also omitted the poem which gave the true lyrical touch to the first Bower scene; a little dialogue which, if it had been sung as was intended after the curtain rose on an empty stage, would have given the same atmosphere to the act, which the Rainbow song at its close drives home. These were, however, almost the only blots upon an otherwise admirably reverent adaptation. Irving told me that he always came down to listen behind the curtain to the last _entr'acte_ (the Martyrdom), in order to get into the right mood for the final scene. Coming from an actor, who knew nothing of musical technique beyond an extraordinarily acute sense of what was fitting or not fitting for stage purposes, this was a great gratification and a still greater encouragement to one of the many composers whom he so loyally befriended.

The production of "Becket" was a memorable red-letter day for the modern English stage; the more so as the tragedy came and conquered a public which was little prepared for the finest specimen of its type which had been seen since the days of Shakespeare. It was fitting that the reign of the greatest Queen since Elizabeth should have such a play inscribed in its annals, an appropriate and worthy counterpart to those of her great predecessor's days.

THE ATt.i.tUDE OF TENNYSON TOWARDS SCIENCE

By SIR OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S.

Henry Sidgwick wrote in 1860 concerning Tennyson that he "regarded him as pre-eminently the Poet of Science"; and to explain his meaning he contrasts the att.i.tude of Wordsworth to Nature with that of Tennyson:

The Nature for which Wordsworth stirred our feelings was Nature as known by simple observation and interpreted by religious and sympathetic intuition.