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A KEY TO LORD TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM."

GEORGE BELL & SONS, LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN NEW YORK: 66, FIFTH AVENUE, AND BOMBAY: 53, ESPLANADE ROAD CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO

A KEY TO LORD TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM"

BY ALFRED GATTY, D.D. VICAR OF ECCLESFIELD AND SUB-DEAN OF YORK

LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1900

Dedication.

TO THE CHERISHED MEMORY OF THE MOTHER OF MY CHILDREN, I DEDICATE THIS BRIEF LABOUR OF LOVE.--A. G.

PREFACE

When any one has survived the allotted age of man, there is a long past to remember, and a short future to expect; and it is the period of youth which is then found most clearly recorded on the tablets of the brain--the days, probably, of school and college, and the first establishment of a self-made home.

To me, this Poem has been an additional buttress to the faith, which my education and sacred profession had sustained.

When a great mind, at once so speculative and so untrammelled, runs over the whole field of thought, and comes to the conviction that the hope of the Christian is the one sure prospect beyond the grave; this imparts to the mourner a consolation, to which nothing earthly can compare.

My own interest in this great Poem has been farther enhanced by the fact that I and mine, long years ago, enjoyed friendly intercourse with the Poet at Freshwater; and this was afterwards renewed in the lives of his younger son and mine.

After sleeping at Horncastle, we drove six miles across a flat uninteresting country, where the fields betrayed signs of agricultural depression, until a short steep descent brought us into a more sheltered and wooded region, where was the sound of running water; and the little old church, with its square stumpy moss-covered tower, told us that we were in the village of Somersby--

"the well-beloved place Where first we gazed upon the sky."

And one could well fancy that the roomy comfortable residence, in which the Rev. Dr. Tennyson reared a large family, was a cherished home, and is still held in fond remembrance.

This house is not the Rectory, though for a long time it was so tenanted: it is rather the Manor House of the Burton family, who for centuries have owned the land and been patrons of the living. The present possessor now occupies it, and he received our visit of interested enquiry with much courtesy and kindness.

The house stands a little back from the road, with a drive to the door which may be called the front entrance; though the principal rooms are behind, and look into the garden. Here are the

"Witch-elms that counterchange the floor Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;"

Beyond the lawn stretches the garden, and yet a little farther is a pond, on which, they say, the young inhabitants of the pseudo-Rectory learned to skate. The largest room in this Manor House was added by Dr. Tennyson: it is the dining-room, with an open groined roof; and the walls of it are now covered with apparently old paintings--heirlooms, one may suppose, of the Burton family.

In the centre of the hamlet, where three roads meet, with a guide-post directing the wayfarer to Louth, Horncastle, and Alford, there stands a fine witch-elm; and at Bag Enderby, also in the middle of the road, is another still larger witch-elm, with a huge arm that craves support. Both these trees were carried and planted, about a century ago, by the grandfather of Mr. Burton, the present proprietor of the estate.

Somersby and Bag Enderby are hamlets about one quarter of a mile apart, and are held by one Rector, who now resides at the latter place. Their ancient churches are structures of more strength than beauty; and though neither of them is larger than a good sized chamber, it quite suffices for the few inhabitants. At both churches we found the key in the door, and could therefore investigate the sacred buildings at our leisure; and coming from a populous manufacturing district, with a grand mediaeval parish church, we found the contrast very striking.

Somersby churchyard adjoins the road, but the ground is higher. The first object which greets you on entering through a short shaded path, is a most remarkable crucifix, which has fortunately escaped the hand of Puritan violence. On a thin stone shaft, which is at least twelve feet high, there is the carved figure of our Lord on the Cross, still plainly traceable; and behind is a full-length draped female figure. This antique gem is sheltered under a narrow-pointed roof of stone. It is a curious and rare memorial of ante-Reformation times; and within the porch there is a contemporary relic--a shallow stone basin for holy water--which still seems to invite the finger to dip, and mark the holy sign. Over the porch entrance is a plain dial with the motto, "Time passeth."

The exterior of the church shows strong coarse stone masonry, which is here and there repaired and patched by local art with bricks. In the small graveyard are two altar tombs, which drew our attention. They seem to cover a vault, and are railed round; and the inscription on one records that Dr. Tennyson held the livings of Somersby, Bag Enderby, Benniworth, and Great Grimsby, and that he died on 16th March, 1831, aged 52. Wild violets were in flower encircling the base of this tomb. A successor was buried near, the Rev. L. B. Burton, who had held the two adjoining benefices for more than forty years.

Immediately opposite the church, and closely adjacent to the Manor House, is a very remarkable building, of considerable architectural pretension; as will be credited when it is told that Sir J. Vanbrugh designed it! It is entirely composed of brick--sombre and solid in character--it has a flat roof and is battlemented. If differently placed, it might have suggested Mariana's "Moated Grange." It is an edifice of more exterior grandeur than the adjoining Manor House, and the rooms are lined with oak panelling; but it is unsuited to the habits of modern life, and now stands empty.

The village of Enderby is, like its sister hamlet, absolutely rural, with an antiquated little church, much needing such material repair as times and circumstances do not seem to allow. It is dedicated to S. Margaret, and has a fine old font, octagonal in shape, and each side has rudely carved figures upon it. The flat modern ceiling cuts off the point of the chancel arch, and the same disfigurement occurs at the west end, where the two bells are rung from the floor. In neither village did we see either a nonconformist chapel or a public-house.

How the friendship came about which has found such undying record in this Poem, is soon told. Alfred Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam met, as undergraduates, at Trinity College, Cambridge, about the year 1828. Tennyson, born in 1809, was the older by one year and a half. Both these young men were inheritors of remarkable ability--the one being a son of the distinguished historian, and the other a son of an accomplished divine--both, too, were themselves highly educated, and one at least was possessed of the highest genius. Their friendship was not founded on a common participation in the ordinary interests of youth, but they sympathized in poetical temperament and philosophical taste. The mental stature of Hallam, and his pure and beautiful disposition in their college life, are recalled by the Poet in many places, but especially in Poems cix. and following.

In 1829, the two friends competed for the Chancellor's gold medal for the English Prize Poem, the subject being "Timbuctoo," and Tennyson gained it. This College intimacy was continued at both their homes, and Hallam became engaged in marriage to one of Tennyson's sisters. This alliance may have deepened the attachment of the friends; but was not needed to account for the survivor writing of the departed as "more than my brothers are to me."

Arthur Hallam took his degree at Cambridge in January, 1832, and then lived with his father in London; having been entered on the boards of the Inner Temple, as a student of Law. At the beginning of August, 1833, they went a short tour into Germany, and, in returning to Vienna from Pesth, a wet day caused a slight attack of intermittent fever in Arthur, which was apparently subsiding, when a sudden rush of blood to the head put an instantaneous end to his life, on the 15th September, 1833.

My friend, Edward Malan, gives the following graphic account of his visit to Hallam's grave--

"The chief attraction for visitors to Clevedon is the obscure and solitary parish church of St. Andrew, where the great historian and his eldest son, Arthur Hallam, are interred. You seek it by the beach and through the fields, and you find it at last, an old and lonely church beside the sea, in a hollow between two green headlands. The path up to it, bordered with ash trees and hawthorns, winds along the side of Church Hill, the first of the two headlands, which shuts it from view until, rounding a green shoulder, you come suddenly upon it, like a ghost. Even then, unless you have brought a mind in harmony, there is little to see, for the spot is so deserted and so lifeless that you seem to have stepped back through centuries, and to be moving in some old-world time. A weird sensation creeps over you, gazing on the ivy and wall-rue, and the path trodden by cottagers--a feeling akin to awe, which reminds you somehow of the poems of Ossian. You are in the presence of these three grey sisters, grey thought, grey silence, grey repose: only clouds, like a troop of mourners, hurrying up over the waste, only a solemn dirge as the wind sweeps wailing by, only the low faint murmur of the sea. The sun's last beams are on the distant hills, and the tide is ebbing dim and shadowy to the shadowy ocean beyond.

"Inside, the church is old and dim, and filled with a faint odour of age. As the wind rises, mysterious pulses of sound awaken in the rafters overhead. The monuments of the Hallams are not in the chancel, but they are in the manor aisle affixed to the western wall. There are four of them, Arthur Hallam's being one of the two centre tombs.

I may state that we had an interesting conversation with the sexton at Clevedon, Augustus James. He had held the office for about eighteen years, and perfectly remembered the interment of Arthur Hallam. His father, who was sexton for forty-three years, made the vault, and officiated at the burial.

Being astonished by the account of a hearse and mourning coaches traversing the whole distance from Dover to Clevedon, and employing sixteen horses for the journey, I ventured to ask the late Sir A. H. Elton, if he could corroborate the report, and he replied: "I think there may have been some truth in the statement of the old sexton. I believe that on the Continent very great precautions are required by the authorities, before the remains of a deceased person are permitted to be removed from the place in which the death occurred. I can easily believe that the heavy amount of lead, and other precautions, rendered it necessary to use a large force of horses." A. James says, that "the coffin was carried in every night where they stopped."

Clevedon itself is a semi-seaside place, by no means interesting, at least as we saw it; for the water was thick and had none of the bold features of the genuine ocean. But Clevedon Court, the seat of Sir Edmund H. Elton, to whom we had an introduction, is a picturesque rambling mansion, of which the most beautiful part is many centuries old, and the grounds are lovely. And I cannot pass by the interest and pleasure we derived from an insight into Sir Edmund's workshop, where, self-taught, he manufactures with his own hands, aided by a crippled lad who is his pupil, the beautiful pottery now well known to connoisseurs as the "Elton ware," and of which he kindly gave us a specimen.

Since this autumn visit , which led to my appealing to Lady Lennard--a surviving sister of Arthur Hallam--on the point of obtaining a portrait of her brother, I have received from this lady the gift of a copy of the volume known as the "Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam," edited by his father, and which was privately printed. The interest of its contents was much enhanced to me by there being a portrait of Arthur from a bust by Chantrey, which Lady Lennard considers most like her brother, and therefore most suitable as a frontispiece to my book.

I must add that the plate on which the portrait is engraved is in the possession of Mr. Murray, of Albemarle Street, to whom was entrusted the production of the volume, and he has been most kind in affording facilities for my having a number of copies of the engraving.

A KEY TO LORD TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM."

Longfellow published a Poem, not earlier than 1842, which he called "The Ladder of St. Augustine;" and more recently, Lowell, another American Poet, and Minister Plenipotentiary in London, adopted a similar idea when he said,

"'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our feet firm planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unseal'd."

The "dead selves" of Tennyson are neither our vices nor our calamities; but, rather, our general experiences, which all perish as they happen; and of these, in his own case, the special loss he had sustained in the death of Hallam ought to rouse him to soar into "higher things;" rather than leave him to be pointed at, as "the man that loved and lost" ; and all that he had before been, as now "over-worn," and prostrated by this one bereavement.

But the struggle back to past contentment and happiness is difficult; and the "Old Yew" of the churchyard seems to typify his present state of feeling.

Its roots and fibres stretch downward, and hold the skull and bones of the dead; like as his thoughts cling to his departed friend. Its "dusk" or shadow is before the church clock, which strikes the hours of mortality, and this harmonizes with his life of mourning.

The tree preserves its "thousand years of gloom," unchanged by the seasons which affect other things--the "old yew" continues always the same--

"And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood, And grow incorporate into thee."

"Sick for" means, desirous of.

Observe the recent introduction of Poem xxxix.; also the description, near the beginning of "The Holy Grail"--

"They sat Beneath a world-old yew tree, darkening half The cloisters, on a gustful April morn That puff'd the swaying branches into smoke.

O, brother, I have seen this yew-tree smoke, Spring after spring, for half a hundred years."

It will be seen, in the later Poem, how a comparison with the gloomy yew has been modified.

"Sorrow, cruel fellowship," from which he cannot disengage himself, now reigns within him, and distorts with "lying lip" all Nature and her beneficent workings; making these seem to have no purpose or end. All which is but an echo of his own dark feelings. Shall he then believe this false guide--

"Embrace her as my natural good; Or crush her, like a vice of blood, Upon the threshold of the mind?"

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