Tennyson and His Friends Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: FREDERICK TENNYSON.]

TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS FREDERICK AND CHARLES

By CHARLES TENNYSON[11]

My uncle Frederick lived near St. Heliers, and my father and I visited him (1887) in his house, overlooking the town and harbour of St.

Heliers, Elizabeth Castle, and St. Aubyn's Bay. The two old brothers talked much of bygone days; of the "red honey gooseberry," and the "golden apples" in Somersby garden, and of the tilts and tourneys they held in the fields; of the old farmers and "swains"; of their college friends; and of the waste sh.o.r.e at Mablethorpe: and then turned to later days, and to the feelings of old age. My father said of Frederick's poems that "they were organ-tones echoing among the mountains." Frederick told Alfred as they parted that "not for twenty years had he spent such a happy day."--_Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son._

To C. T.

True poet, surely to be found When Truth is found again.

Of all the brothers of Alfred Tennyson the closest akin to him were Frederick and Charles. The three were born in successive years, Frederick in 1807, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. They slept together in a little attic under the roof of the old white Rectory at Somersby, they played together, read together, studied together under the guidance of their father, and all three left home to go together to the school at Louth, which Alfred and Charles at least held in detestation until their latest years. Frederick was the first to break up the brotherhood, for, in 1817, he left Louth for Eton, but to the end of his long life--he outlived all his brothers--he seems to have looked back on the days of his childhood through the medium of this fraternal trinity. Years afterwards he wrote of their common submission to the influence of Byron, who "lorded it over them, with an immitigable tyranny," and a fire at Farringford in 1876 brings to his mind the destruction of their Aunt Mary's house at Louth, in the gardens of which he wrote: "I, and Charles, and Alfred, enthusiastic children, used to play at being Emperors of China, each appropriating a portion of the old echoing garden as our domain, and making them reverberate our tones of authority."

At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and strength would have well qualified them to excel, and pa.s.sed their time chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat sh.o.r.es of their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the _Poems by Two Brothers_, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John's, Cambridge (his father's old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the 10 which the publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoa.r.s.e on the sh.o.r.e as they rolled out poem by poem in one another's ears. The notes and headings to the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from Byron, five from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa's _Voyages_, Beattie, Rennel's _Herodotus_, Savary's _Letters_, Tacitus' _Annals_, Pliny, Suetonius' _Lives of the Caesars_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, Racine, the _Mysteries of Udolpho_, _La Auruncana_, the _Songs of Jayadeva_, Sir William Jones (_History of Nadir Shah_, _Eastern Plants_, and _Works_, vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful_, Dr.

Langhorne's _Collins_, Mason's _Caractacus_, Rollin, Contino's _Epitaph on Camoens_, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young, Sale's Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli's _Curiosities of Literature_, Sall.u.s.t, Terence, Lucretius, c.o.xe's _Switzerland_, Rousseau, the _Ranz des Vaches_, _Baker on Animalculae_, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd sc.r.a.ps of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.

Alfred and Charles followed Frederick to Cambridge in 1828 and entered Trinity, whither their elder brother had just migrated from John's. All the three brothers attained a certain amount of rather unconventional distinction at the University; Frederick, who had taken a high place on his entrance into Eton and subsequently became Captain of the Oppidans, obtained the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode (in Sapphic metre) on the Pyramids, the last cadence of which, "[Greek: ollumenon gar achthon exapoleitai]," is the only fragment which tradition has preserved. Charles obtained a Bell Scholarship in 1829, chiefly through the beauty of his translations into English (one line, "And the ruddy grape shall droop from the desert thorn," was always remembered by Alfred), and the youngest brother secured, as is well known, the University Prize for English Verse with his "Timbuctoo." None of the brothers, however, attained great distinction in the schools, though Frederick and Charles graduated B.A. in 1832. With the end of their Cambridge careers the brotherhood finally dissolved. It was at first proposed that all three should (in deference to the wish of their grandfather), become clergymen. Frederick had always shown a certain independence and intractability of character. At Eton, though a skilful and ardent cricketer, he acquired a reputation for eccentricity, and Sir Francis Doyle describes him as "rather a silent, solitary boy, not always in perfect harmony with Keate,"--a gentleman with whom most spirits, however ardent, generally found it convenient to agree.

Sir Francis recounts one typical incident: Frederick, then in the sixth form, had returned to school four days late after the Long Vacation. Keate sent for him and demanded an explanation. None was forthcoming. Keate stormed in his best manner, his prominent eyebrows shooting out, and his Punch-like features working with fury, Frederick remaining all the while cynically calm. Finally the fiery doctor insists with many objurgations on a written apology from the boy's father, whereupon the culprit leisurely produces a crumpled letter from his pocket and hands it coolly to the head-master. A fresh tirade follows, accusing Frederick of every defect of character and principle known to ethics, and concluding, "_and showing such a temper too_"!

How little Frederick regarded himself as fitted for Holy Orders may be judged from a letter he wrote in 1832 to his friend John Frere: "I expect," he says, "to be ordained in June, without much reason, for hitherto I have made no kind of preparation, and a pretty parson I shall make, I'm thinking." The grandfather came apparently to share this conclusion, for the ordination never took place.

It must have been about this time that Frederick made the acquaintance of Edward FitzGerald, who was two years his junior. The pair maintained a close correspondence for many years, and "Fitz" became G.o.dfather to one of his friend's sons and left a legacy to be divided among his three daughters.

Frederick's fine presence and frank, tempestuous, independent nature seem to have made a powerful appeal to the younger man, for he had the great height, n.o.ble proportions, and dome-like forehead of the Tennyson family, and was so robustly built that it is said that in later years, when he lived in Florence, a new servant girl, on seeing him for the first time speeding up his broad Italian staircase in British knee-breeches, fell back against the wall in astonishment, exclaiming, "Santissima Madonna, che gambe!" Unlike his brothers, however, his hair (which he wore rather longer than was common even at that time) was fair and his eyes blue.

"I remember," wrote Fitz in 1843, "the days of the summer when you and I were together quarrelling and laughing.... Our trip to Gravesend has left a perfume with me. I can get up with you on that everlastingly stopping coach on which we tried to travel from Gravesend to Maidstone that Sunday morning: worn out with it we got down at an Inn and then got up on another coach, and an old smiling fellow pa.s.sed us holding out his hat--and you said, "That old fellow must go about as Homer did," and numberless other turns of road and humour, which sometimes pa.s.s before me as I lie in bed."

And in the next year he writes:

How we pulled against each other at Gravesend! You would stay--I wouldn't--then I would--then we did. Do you remember that girl at the bazaar ... then the gentleman who sang at Ivy Green?

And seven years later Gravesend and its [Greek: anerithmoi] shrimps are still in his memory.

Very soon, however, after leaving Cambridge, Frederick, who had inherited a comfortable property at Grimsby, set out for Italy, and in Italy and near the Mediterranean he remained, with the exception of an occasional visit to England, until 1859.

He was pa.s.sionately fond of travel, which, as he used to say, "makes pleasure solemn and pain sweet," and even his marriage in 1839 to Maria Giuliotti, daughter of the chief magistrate of Siena, could not induce him to make a settled home. In 1841 we hear of him (through "Fitz") in Sicily, playing a cricket match against the crew of the _Bellerophon_ on the Parthenopaean Hills, and "_sacking_ the sailors by ninety runs." "I like that such men as Frederick should be abroad," adds the writer, "so strong, haughty, and pa.s.sionate," and in 1842 "Fitz" pictures him "laughing and singing, and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of the warm South." All the while he continued to write to FitzGerald "accounts of Italy, finer" (says the latter) "than any I ever heard."

Once he describes himself coming suddenly upon Cicero's Formian villa, with its mosaic pavement leading through lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain bubbling up "as fresh as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator sitting there in the stillness of the noonday, devoting the siesta hours to study." FitzGerald replies with letters full of affection; he sighs for Frederick's "Englishman's humours"--for their old quarrels: "I mean quarrel in the sense of a good, strenuous difference of opinion, supported on either side by occasional outbursts of spleen. Come and let us try," he adds, "you used to irritate my vegetable blood." "I constantly think of you," he writes, "and as I have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love I feel towards but two or three friends ... you, Spedding, Thackeray, and only one or two more."

And again: "It is because there are so few F. Tennysons in the world that I do not like to be wholly out of hearing of the one I know.... I see so many little natures that I must draw to the large."

All this time Frederick was writing verse and Fitz constantly urges him to publish. "You are now the only man I expect verse from," he writes in 1850, after he had given Alfred up as almost wholly fallen from grace.

"Such gloomy, grand stuff as you write." Again: "We want some bits of strong, genuine imagination.... There are heaps of single lines, couplets, and stanzas that would consume the ----s and ----s like stubble."

Much of their correspondence is taken up with the discussion of music.

They both agree in placing Mozart above all other composers. Beethoven they find too a.n.a.lytical and erudite. Original, majestic, and profound, they acknowledge him, but at times bizarre and morbid.

"We all raved about Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats," wrote Frederick long after, in 1885, "but none of them have retained their hold on me with the same power as that little tone poet with the long nose, knee-breeches, and pigtail." Indeed he was at different times told by two mediums that the spirit of Mozart in these same knee-breeches and pigtail accompanied him, invisibly to the eye of sense, as a familiar. Music was the pa.s.sion of Frederick Tennyson's life. It was said among his friends that when he settled in Florence (as he did soon after 1850), he lived in a vast Hall designed by Michael Angelo, surrounded by forty fiddlers, and he used to improvise on a small organ until he was over eighty years of age.

"After all," he wrote in 1874, "Music is the Queen of the Arts. What are all the miserable concrete forms into which we endeavour to throw 'thoughts too deep for tears' or too rapturous for mortal mirth, compared with the divine, abstract, oceanic utterances of that voice which can multiply a thousandfold and exhaust in infinite echoes the pa.s.sions that on canvas, in marble, or even in poesy (the composite style in aesthetics), so often leave us cold and emotionless! I believe Music to be as far above the other Arts as the affections of the soul above the rarest ingenuity of the perfect orator! Perhaps you are far from agreeing with me. Indeed the common charge brought against her by her sisters among the Pierides--and by the transcendentalists and philosophical Critics--is that She has no type like the other Arts on which to model her creations and to regulate her inspirations. I say her inexhaustible spring is the soul itself, and its fiery inmost--the chamber illuminated from the centre of Being--as the finest and most subtle ethers are begotten of, and flow nearest to the Sun."

Frederick lived at Florence till 1857 and found there, after years of wandering, his first settled home. The idea of settling tickled his humour, and in 1853 he writes: "I am a regular family man now with four children (the last of whom promises to be the most eccentric of a humorous set) and an Umbrella." In Florence he came in contact with Caroline Norton and her son Brinsley, of the latter of whom he writes an amusing account:

Young Norton has married a peasant girl of Capri, who, not a year ago, was scampering bare-footed and bare-headed over the rocks and shingles of that island. He has turned Roman Catholic among other accomplishments--being in search, he said, of a "graceful faith."...

Parker has just published a volume of his which he ent.i.tled "Pinocchi: or Seeds of the Pine," meaning that out of this small beginning he, Brin, would emerge, like the pine, which is to be "the mast of some great Admiral," from its seedling. He is quite unable to show the applicability of this t.i.tle, and, seeing that the book has been very severely handled in one of the periodicals under the head of "Poetical Nuisances," some are of opinion that "Pedocchi" would have been a more fitting name for it. However, to do him no injustice, he has sparks of genius, plenty of fancy and improvable stuff in him, and is, moreover, a young gentleman of that irrepressible buoyancy which, to use the language of the _Edinburgh Review_, "rises by its own rottenness...."

As I said, he is not more than three-and-twenty, but is very much in the habit of commencing narrative in this manner: "In my young days when I used to eat off gold plate!" to which I reply, "Really a fine old gentleman like you should have more philosophy than to indulge in vain regrets."

While we were located at Villa Brichieri, up drove one fine day the famous Caroline, his mother, who, not to speak of her personal attractions, is really, I should say, a woman of genius, if only judged by her novel, _Stuart of Dunleath_, which is full of deep pathos to me. I asked Brin one day what his mother thought of me. He stammers very much, and he said, "She th-th-th-thinks very well of you, but I d-d-don't think she likes your family." "Good heavens!

here's news," I said. Well, afterwards she told me of having met Alfred at Rogers', and of having heard that he had taken a dislike to her. "Why, Mrs. Norton," I said, "that must be nearly thirty years ago, and do you harbour vindictive feelings so long?" "Oh!" she said, "why, I'm not thirty!"

Again, one day we met her in a country house where we were invited to meet her, and soon after she had shaken hands with me she said, with a dubious kind of jocosity, "I should like to see all the Tennysons hung up in a row before the Villa Brichieri." Upon the whole, I thought her a strange creature, and she has not yet lost her beauty--a grand Zen.o.bian style certainly, but, like many celebrated beauties, she seems to have won the whole world. Among other things she said in allusion to some incident, "What mattered it to me whether it was an old or a young man--I who all my life have made conquests?" It seemed to me that to dazzle in the great world was her princ.i.p.al ambition, and literary glory her second.[12]

But Frederick was too much of a man of moods to care for society. He used to describe himself as a "person of gloomy insignificance and unsocial monomania." Society he dismissed contemptuously as "Snookdom," and would liken it gruffly to a street row. The "high-jinks of the high-nosed" (to use another phrase of his) angered him, as did all persons "who go about with well-cut trousers and ill-arranged ideas." The consequence was that his acquaintance in Florence long remained narrow. In 1854, shortly after the birth of his second son, he wrote:

Sponsors I have succeeded in hooking, one in this manner: A friend of mine called yesterday and introduced a Mr. Jones. "Sir," said I, "happy to see you. Like to be a G.o.dfather?" "Really," he said, not quite prepared for the honour, "do my best." "Thank you, then I'll call for you on my way to the church"; so Mr. Jones was booked.

One hears, however, of a visit of Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide Kemble) in 1854.

"I had not seen her for twenty years," writes Frederick; "she is grown colossal, but all her folds of fat have not extinguished the love of music in her." But one friendship which Frederick made in Florence was destined to be a lifelong pleasure to him. In 1853 he writes:

The Brownings I have but recently become acquainted with. They really are the very best people in the world, and a real treasure to that Hermit, a Poet. Browning is a wonderful man with inexhaustible memory, animal spirits, and bonhomie. He is always ready with the most apropos anecdote, and the happiest bon mot, and his vast acquaintance with out-of-the-way knowledge and the quaint Curiosity Shops of Literature make him a walking encyclopaedia of marvels. Mrs. B., who never goes out--being troubled like other inspired ladies with a chest--is a little unpretending woman, yet full of power, and, what is far better, loving-kindness; and never so happy as when she can get into the thick of mysterious Clairvoyants, Rappists, Ecstatics, and Swedenborgians.

Only think of their having lived full five years at Florence with all these virtues hidden in a bushel to me!

In 1854 he published his first volume of verse, _Days and Hours_. The book was, on the whole, well received. Charles Kingsley (whose early and discriminating recognition of the merits of George Meredith places him high among the critics of his day) wrote: "The poems are the work of a finished scholar, of a man who knows all schools, who has profited more or less by all, and who often can express himself, while revelling in luxurious fancies, with a grace and terseness which Pope himself might have envied." There was, however, a good deal of adverse criticism, and it was probably mainly owing to his irritation at many of the strictures (often futile enough) which were pa.s.sed upon him at this time that he kept silence for the next thirty-six years. At any rate, he was always ready to the end of his life for a growl or a thunder at the critics.

In 1857 Frederick Tennyson left Florence and after spending some time in Pisa and Genoa finally settled in Jersey, where he made his home for nearly forty years. During all this period he maintained a regular and detailed correspondence with Mrs. Brotherton, the wife of his friend Augustus Brotherton, the artist, with whom he had begun to exchange letters while still at Florence. His life was now a very quiet one, for, except for an occasional visit to England, he never left home. His children with their families visited him from time to time. His brother Charles came with his wife to see him in 1867, as did the Brownings on their way to Italy, and Alfred also paid him visits, the last of which was in 1892. On the whole, however, his days, for one who had been so pa.s.sionately fond of travel and of a life of colour, warmth, and excitement, were singularly peaceful. But he retained to the last his astonishing vitality. His health remained tolerably good in spite of the nervous irritability and reactions of melancholy which were inseparable from the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his temperament. "Poor Savile Morton used to stare at me with wonder," he writes. "'I cannot conceive,' he said, 'how a man with such a stomach can be subject to hypochondria.'" In 1867, at the age of sixty, he batted for an hour to his nephew Lionel's bowling, hoping thereby to be able "to revive the cricket habit," and his mind continued extraordinarily active; not a movement in world politics or thought escaped him; he read voraciously and continued to write verse in a rather desultory fashion. His appet.i.te for beauty, too, remained as keen as ever and even developed. "The longer I live," he wrote in 1885, "the more delicate become my perceptions of beautiful nature." And that appet.i.te found ample food in the scenery of the bowery island, the whole ambit of which, with its curling tree-tops and distant lawny s.p.a.ces dappled with sunshine and surrounded, as it seemed, by the whole immensity of the globe, could be seen from a point near his house.

In his isolation, however, his active mind tended to become more and more possessed by certain ideas, with which everything he read and heard was brought into relation. While still at Florence he had (possibly under the influence of Mrs. Browning) become greatly interested in the teachings of Swedenborg and the phenomena of spiritualism which seemed to him a natural development of Swedenborg's theories. At first he was apt to speak rather lightly of spirit revelations. In 1852 he wrote to Alfred:

"Powers the sculptor here, who is a Swedenborgian, says he once had a vision of two interwoven angels upon a ground of celestial azure clearly revealed to him by supernatural light after he had put out his candle and was lying awake in bed, and believes that these are only the beginning of wonders; the spirits themselves announce the dawn of a new time and the coming of the Millennium, and he firmly believes that all we now do by costly material processes will in the returning Golden Age of the world be accomplished for us by ministering spirits.

'Thou shalt see the angels of heaven ascending and descending on the Son of man.' I go with him as far as to believe that these are spiritual revelations, but I confess I cannot accompany him in his belief in their beneficent intentions. G.o.d speaks to the heart of man by His Spirit, not thro' table legs; the miracles of Christ were of inestimable worth, but these unfortunate ghosts either drivel like schoolgirls or bounce out at once into the most shameful falsehoods, and by their actual presence, pretending to be in their final state, they seem to have for their object, tho' they carefully avoid touching on those subjects, to undermine in the hearts of Christians the spiritual doctrines of the Resurrection of the spiritual body and of the judgment to come. And the more effectually to unsettle the old Theology, the cant of these spirits is that G.o.d is a G.o.d of Love, Love, Love, continually repeated _ad nauseam_. So He is, but 'My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor My ways your ways,' 'He scourgeth every son that He receiveth,' 'He loveth those whom He chasteneth,'

'it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living G.o.d,' 'the pitiful G.o.d trieth the hearts and the reins.' But these spirits, by for ever harping upon the Love of G.o.d in their insipid language, seem to me to be anxious to persuade us that He is a 'fine old country gentleman with large estate,' or something of that kind, seated in a deeply-cushioned armchair, and patting the heads of His rebellious children when they come whimpering to Him, yielding to anything in the shape of intercession, and, rather than that St. Joseph or any other saint should be offended, ready to admit a brigand into Heaven. So that I thoroughly distrust your spirits and expect no virtue will come out of them. They only seem to me last links in the chain of modern witchcrafts which will probably end with the Devil."[13] And a little later he writes: "Owen the Socialist and a host of infidels by a peculiar logical process of their own, after seeing a table in motion, instantly believe in the immortality of the Soul. To me it is astounding and even awful, that in this nineteenth century after Christ--whose resurrection of the body rests on as strong a ground of proof as many of the best attested historical events--men should be beginning again with that vague and unsatisfactory phantom of a creed which must have been old in the time of Homer."

It was not long before he became a complete convert to Swedenborgianism and firmly convinced of the reality of the Spiritualistic phenomena with which the press and literature of the day began to be flooded. Indeed at one time he believed that spirits communicated with himself by a kind of electrical ticking, which he was constantly hearing in his room at night, and used at their dictation to do a certain amount of automatic writing.

The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that he was forced to conclude the spirits to be of an evil and untrustworthy nature, and he therefore abandoned the practice of spiritualism altogether. He remained, however, convinced of the fact that living men were able to communicate with the spirits of the departed, who had been able, since the end (in 1757) of the second dispensation (according to Swedenborg) and the abolition of the intermediate state of purgatory which accompanied it, to establish direct intercourse with our world, and he believed that this rapid increase of communication was a sign of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, of the total abolition of all barriers between the material and spiritual worlds, and the actual physical regeneration of man in the Millennium predicted by Christ and the prophets. The natural and political tumults of which the nineteenth century was so prolific seemed to him to point in the same direction, and to fall in with the prophecy of Daniel which he was never tired of quoting.

Frederick abandoned these views at the end of his life, but it is not difficult to see how they came to acquire such a hold on him. He was essentially a mystic and clung most fervently to the belief in a future life, where all good things should be taken up into the spiritual life and glorified.

"My daylight," he wrote in 1853, "is sombered by a natural instinct of unearthliness, a looking backwards and forwards for that sunny land which Imagination robes in unfailing Summer where no tears dim the Light, and no graves lie underneath our feet, by the side of which Riches, honors, even Health the first of blessings, all, in short, that is commonly called Happiness, looks cold and imperfect--while the great Shadow of Death fills up the distance, and the steps to it lie over withered garlands and dry bones." And again: "For an ill.u.s.tration of the bliss and delight of that higher state of being which under the influence of that Spirit-Sun shall hereafter rise daily to its appointed task, whatever that may be, with full heart and mind--I go back to 'the days that are no more,' when I used to dive into the sunny morn, rejoicing in my strength, refreshed with dreamless sleep 'like a giant with wine,' carrying my whole soul with me without fears or regrets, with a joy focussed like sunlight through a lens, on the infinite present moment! Such memories, tho' mournful, are blessed if they bring with them a.n.a.logies of the 'Higher State to Be.' For the angel is but the infant sublimated--the rapture and the innocence, with the Wisdom and the Power adjoined, and crowned with Immortality! That is to say his will being in all things conformable to the Divine--he receives the divine influences which are heaven! And surely my unshakable belief is that all created beings--even those who have chosen the lowest h.e.l.l--will be eventually redeemed, exalted, and glorified--or there would be an Infinite Power of Good unable or unwilling to subdue Finite Evil."

His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the "frowzy diatribes of black men with white ties--too often the only white thing about them" (one can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the "little papacies" that dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape his wrath.

Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even greater bitterness, as the following letter shows: