Chapter XXXI: Somersby and the Tennysons

Tennyson’s Poetry descriptive of his home—Bronze Bust of the
Poet—Dedication Festival—A Long-lived Family—Dialect poems.

This little quiet village, tucked away in a fold of the hills, with the eastern ridge of the Wolds at its back and the broad meadow valley stretching away in front of it and disappearing eastwards in the direction of the sea, had no history till now. It was only in 1808 that Dr. George Clayton Tennyson came to Somersby as rector of Somersby and Bag Enderby, incumbent of Beniworth and Vicar of Great Grimsby. He came as a disappointed man, for his father, not approving, it is said, of his marriage with Miss ffytche of Louth (a reason most unreasonable if it was so) had disinherited him in favour of his younger brother Charles, who became accordingly Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt of Bayons Manor near Tealby.

Dr. Tennyson’s eldest son George was born in the parsonage at Tealby, in 1806, but died an infant. Frederick was born at Louth in 1807, and the other ten children at Somersby. Of these, the first two were Charles (1808) and Alfred (1809).

They were a family of poets; their father wrote good verse, and their grandmother, once Mary Turner of Caister, always claimed that Alfred got all his poetry through her. Her husband George was a member of Parliament and lived in the _old_ house at Bayons Manor.

[Sidenote: THE TENNYSONS]

From the fourteenth century the Tennysons, like their neighbours the Rawnsleys, had lived in Yorkshire; but Dr. Tennyson’s great-grandfather, Ralph, had come south of the Humber about 1700 to Barton and Wrawby near Brigg, and each succeeding generation moved south again. Thus, Michael, who married Elizabeth Clayton, lived at Lincoln, and was the father of George, the first Tennyson occupant of Bayons Manor. He had four children: George Clayton, the poet’s father; Charles, who took the name of Tennyson d’Eyncourt; Elizabeth, the “Aunt Russell” that the poet and his brothers and sisters were so fond of; and Mary, the wife of John Bourne of Dalby, of whom, though she lived so near to them, the Somersby children were content to see very little, for she was a rigid Calvinist, and once said to her nephew, “Alfred, when I look at you I think of the words of Holy Scripture, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.’” At Somersby, then, the poet and all the children after Frederick were born in this order: Charles, Alfred, Mary, Emilia, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, Matilda, Cecilia, Horatio. They were a singularly fine family, tall and handsome, taking after their father in stature (he was six feet two inches) and after their mother (a small and gentle person, whose good looks had secured her no less than twenty-five offers of marriage) in their dark eyes and Spanish colouring. She was idolised by her eight tall sons and her three handsome daughters, of whom Mary, who became Mrs. Ker, was a wonderfully beautiful woman. Frederick, who outlived all his brothers, dying at the age of ninety-one after publishing a volume of poems in his ninetieth year, alone of the family had fair hair and blue eyes. Matilda is alive still at the age of ninety-eight.

[Sidenote: DR. KEATE AND WELLINGTON]

The three elder sons all went to the Grammar School at Louth in 1813, when Alfred was but seven. Frederick went thence to Eton in 1817, and to St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1826; Charles and Alfred stayed at Louth till 1820, and they left it with pleasure for home teaching. Few could have been better qualified to teach than the Doctor. He had a good library and he was a classical scholar; could read Hebrew and was not without a knowledge of mathematics, natural science and modern languages; also he was a rigid disciplinarian, and, like all good schoolmasters, was held in considerable awe by his pupils. I should like to have heard him had anyone in his day outlined to him as the method of the future the Montessori system. This power of terrifying a whole class and causing each one of a set of ordinarily plucky English lads to feel for the space of half an hour that his heart was either in his mouth or in his shoes, would be incredible, were it not that there are so many English gentlemen now living who have experience of it. How well I remember the terrible, if irrational, state of funk which the whole of any class below the upper sixth was always in, when going up for their weekly lesson to that really most genial of men, Edward Thring, and it was the same elsewhere, and given the same sort of circumstances, the grown-up man could feel as frightened as the boy; witness this delightful story of the Iron Duke. No one could call him a coward, but on his return from Waterloo he went down on the fourth of June to Eton, and first told some one in his club that he meant to confess to Keate that he was the boy who had painted the Founder’s Statue or some such iniquity, the perpetrator of which Keate had been unable to discover. His friend extracted a promise that after his interview he would come and report at the club. He came, and being questioned by a group of deeply interested old Etonians, he said, “Well, it was all different, not at all like what I expected. I seized the opportunity when Keate came to speak with me by the window and said, “You remember the Founder’s Statue being defaced, sir?” “Certainly. Do you know anything about it?” he said sharply. “_No, sir._” “You don’t mean to say you said that?” “Certainly I do, and what is more, every one of you would, in the circumstances, have said just the same,” and then and there they all admitted it; so difficult is it to shake off the feelings of earlier days. And yet he was not naturally terrible, and I who write this, never having been under him, have, as a small boy, spoken to Keate without a shadow of fear.

This reminds me of a remark of Gladstone’s, who was giving us some delightful reminiscences of his days at Eton, and, speaking enthusiastically of Alfred Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, when on my saying that I had spoken with Keate, he turned half round in his chair and said, “Well, if you say you have seen Keate I must believe you, but I should not have thought it possible.” He had forgotten for the moment that Keate, after retiring from Eton, lived thirteen years at Hartley Westpall (near Strathfieldsaye), where my father was curate.

To return to Somersby. We read in the memoir of the poet an amusing account, by Arthur Tennyson, of how the Doctor’s approach when they were skylarking would make the boys scatter.

[Sidenote: EARLY VOLUMES]

In 1828 Charles and Alfred went up to Trinity, Cambridge. Frederick was already a University prize-winner, having got the gold medal for the Greek ode, and Charles subsequently got the Bell Scholarship, and Alfred the English Verse prize. The boys’ first poetical venture was the volume “Poems by Two Brothers,” published in 1826 by Jackson of Louth, who gave them £20, more than half to be taken out in books. To this volume Frederick contributed four pieces, the rest were by Charles and Alfred. The latter used very properly to speak with impatience of it in later years as his “early rot.” And it is quite remarkable how comparatively superior is the work done by Alfred as a boy of fourteen, and how little one can trace in the two brothers’ volume of that lyrical ability which in 1830 produced _Mariana_ and _The Arabian Nights_, _The Merman_, _The Dying Swan_ and the _Ode to Memory_. The majority of these poems were written at Cambridge, but there is much reference to Somersby in at least two of them, and the song, “A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours,” was, we know, written in the garden there with its border of hollyhocks and tiger-lilies. In the _Ode to Memory_ he invokes her to arise and come, not from vineyards, waterfalls, or purple cliffs, but to

“Come from the Woods that belt the grey hill side,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father’s door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand.
...
O! hither lead thy feet!
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat
Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds,
Upon the ridgèd wolds.”

This is reminiscent of Somersby.

Then again, Memory calls up the pictures of “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea” at Mablethorpe, and the view over “the waste enormous marsh.”

In 1831 Dr. Tennyson died, aged fifty-two, and his sons left Cambridge. His widow lived on for thirty-four years, dying at the age of eighty-four, in 1865. They stayed on in the Somersby home till 1837, and a new volume came out in 1832, with a whole array of poems of rare merit, showing how much the poet’s mind had matured in that last year at Cambridge. This volume, like the Louth volume, is dated for the year after that in which it was really published. It carried Alfred to the front rank at once, for in it was _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Miller’s Daughter_, _Œnone_, _The May Queen_, _New Year’s Eve_, _The Lotus Eaters_, _A Dream of Fair Women_, and the _Lines to James Spedding_, on the death of his brother Edward. Only think of all these wonderful poems in a thin book of 162 pages written before he was twenty-three.

[Sidenote: THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST]

To Mablethorpe and Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast we find frequent allusions in many poems, _e.g._, he speaks in _The Last Tournament_ of “the wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh,” and when the Red Knight in drunken passion, trying to strike the King overbalances himself, he falls—

“As the crest of some slow arching wave,
Heard in dead night along that table shore,
Drops flat, and after, the great waters break
Whitening for half-a-league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing.”

A most accurate picture of that flat Lincolnshire coast with its “league-long rollers,” and hard, wet sands shining in the moonlight. In another place he speaks of “The long low dune and lazy-plunging sea.”

In his volume of 1832 there are many pictures drawn from this familiar coast, _e.g._, in _The Lotus Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Dream of Fair Women_; and in his 1842 volumes he speaks of

“Locksley Hall that in the distance overlooks the sandy flats And the hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts.”

A relative of mine was once reading this poem to the family of one of those Marsh farmers who had known “Mr. Alfred” when a youth, and who lived in the remotest part of that coast near the sandy dunes and far-spread flats between Skegness and “Gibraltar Point”; but she had not got far when at the line—

“Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime,
With the fairy tales of science——”

she was stopped by the farmer’s wife. “Don’t you believe him, Miss, there’s nothing hereabouts to nourish onybody, ’cepting it be an owd rabbit, and it ain’t oftens you can get howd of them.”

[Sidenote: IN MEMORIAM]

_In Memoriam_ has many cantos descriptive of Somersby, both of the happy summer evenings on the lawn, when Mary

“brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the bright’ning moon,”

or of the walks about home with Arthur Hallam—

by “Gray old grange or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple stile from mead to mead,
Or sheepwalk up the windy wold.”

Or the winter nights when

“The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.”

And nothing could be more full of tender feeling than this farewell to the old home in Canto CI., beginning—

“Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away.”

And in Canto CII.—

“We leave the well-beloved place
Where first we gazed upon the sky;
The roofs that heard our earliest cry
Will shelter one of stranger race.

We go, but ere we go from home
As down the garden walks I move,
Two spirits of a diverse love
Contend for loving masterdom.

One whispers ‘here thy boyhood sung
Long since its matin song, and heard
The low love-language of the bird
In native hazels tassel-hung.’

The other answers, ‘yea, but here
Thy feet have strayed in after hours
With thy lost friend among the bowers,
And this hath made them trebly dear.’

These two have striven half the day,
And each prefers his separate claim,
Poor rivals in a loving game,
That will not yield each other way.

I turn to go: my feet are set
To leave the pleasant fields and farms;
They mix in one another’s arms
To one pure image of regret.”

[Sidenote: ARTHUR HALLAM]

Other sections speak of Arthur Hallam, and as each Christmas comes round, or each birthday of his friend, the poet’s feelings are voiced in such a way that, if we read it with care, the poem gives us a good deal of the author’s own life history.

Arthur Hallam died on September 15, 1833, at Vienna, and his remains were brought home at the end of the year and interred at Clevedon in Somersetshire on January 4, 1834.

“The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken’d heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore
And in the hearing of the wave.”

Immediately after his death Tennyson had turned to work as the one solace in his overwhelming grief, although, but for those dependent on his aid, such as his sister Emily who was betrothed to Hallam, he said that he himself would have gladly died. He wrote the fine classic poem _Ulysses_, in which he voiced the need he felt of going forward and braving the struggle of life, and then, before it had reached England, he wrote the first section of _In Memoriam_ No. 9 addressed to the ship with its sad burden.

“Fair ship that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings and waft him o’er.”

At some later time, possibly many years later, for _In Memoriam_ was sixteen years in the making, he added section 10—“I hear the noise about thy keel”—which carries on the subject, and also alludes to Somersby church

“where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.”

For the time he wrote no more sections, but busied himself with _The Two Voices_, only towards the end of 1834 he wrote section 30, which he afterwards prefaced by sections 28 and 29, all describing the sad first Christmas of 1833, the first since Arthur’s death. In 28 he hears the bells of four village steeples near Somersby rising and sinking on the wind. He had more than once wished that he might never hear the Christmas bells again, but the sound of church bells had always touched him from boyhood, just as the words “far, far away” which always set him dreaming. In section 29 he bids his sisters, after decorating the church, make one more wreath for old sake’s sake, to hang within the house.

Then section 30 tells how they wove it.

“With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;”

After this we hear how they made a “vain pretence”

“Of gladness with an awful sense
Of one mute Shadow watching all.”

They attempt the usual Christmas games, but they have no heart for them, and all pause and listen to the wind in the tree-tops and the rain beating on the window panes. Afterwards they sit in a circle and think of Arthur, they try to sing, but the carols only bring tears to their eyes, for only last year he, too, was singing with them. After this Alfred sits alone and watches for the dawn which rises, bringing light and hope.

[Sidenote: LEAVING SOMERSBY]