In the beginning of the eighteenth century the great-grandfather of the famous Lord Macaulay, the author of the glowing and impassioned History of England, was minister of Tiree and Coll, when his stipend was taken from him at the instance of the Laird of Ardchattan. The slight inconvenience of having nothing to live upon did not seem to incline the old minister in the least degree to resign his charge and to seek a flock who could feed their shepherd. He stayed valiantly on, doing his duty faithfully by his humble people. But after some time had elapsed, "his health being much impaired, and there being no church or meeting-house, he was exposed to the violence of the weather at all seasons; and having no manse or glebe, and no fund for communion elements, and having no mortification for schools or other pious purposes in either of the islands, and the air being unwholesome,"—he was finally compelled to leave, much to his own regret and that of his poor little flock.
The reasons enumerated certainly seem sufficient to us in these later days for a change of parishes; and indeed some modern ministers have been known to change upon provocations less than these. There was fine stuff in the old Scotch ministers of that day, and it is pleasant to hear that this one found a new charge to which he ministered for half a century. There were many other ministers in the Macaulay family during several generations; but Zachary Macaulay, the father of the historian, seemed born with a taste for business, and was accordingly sent out to Jamaica to learn mercantile affairs, when quite young. Here he saw much of negro slavery, and became so much impressed with its horrors, and so filled with sympathy for the black race, that he resolved to devote himself to their interests. He accordingly resigned his position in Jamaica and returned to Scotland, where until his death he labored in the unpopular and misunderstood ranks of the abolitionists. A colony was projected in Sierra Leone for freed slaves, and young Macaulay was appointed a member of the council, and sailed for Africa to take practical part in the work for the negro. Soon after his arrival there he succeeded to the position of Governor, and for some time worked heroically in that capacity. But in the very midst of the Reign of Terror in France, a French fleet bore down upon the little colony and almost wiped it out of existence. Zachary Macaulay stayed for a year after the attack, heroically trying to rehabilitate the little colony, and partially succeeded in doing so, when, his health failing, he returned to England, where he gave almost the entire remaining years of his life to the work of negro emancipation in one form or another.
Thomas Babington Macaulay was born the 25th of October, 1800, the day of St. Crispin and the anniversary of Agincourt. He drew in the love of freedom with his earliest breath, and he was reared with the utmost care by those high moralists, his noble parents. He was a prodigy from babyhood. From the time he was three years old he read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire. Many laughable stories are told of his precocity, particularly of the fine language he used when a mere infant. For instance, when four years old some hot coffee was spilled on his legs, and after a little time a lady inquired of him if he felt better now, when the phenomenon replied, "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." Of course so quaint and remarkable a child was much petted and spoiled, and probably rendered somewhat conceited and priggish. But he was docile and affectionate, and was then, as always thereafter, the idol of his family.
After he left Cambridge he went up to London, and soon after wrote his article on Milton for the "Edinburgh Review." Like Byron, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. Compliments and enthusiastic letters poured in upon him from all sides. The one compliment which he said gave him the most pleasure was Jeffrey's word at the end of a business note: "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style." And no wonder; that style was not a thing to be picked up every day. Jeffrey did well to wonder. Macaulay at once became the fashion, and invitations were showered upon him from every side, many of which he accepted. The first flush of such a success as Macaulay's must have been very sweet to a young man of his genial nature. He was thus described by Praed:—
"There came up a short, manly figure, marvellously upright, with a bad neckcloth, and one hand in his waistcoat pocket. Of regular beauty he had little to boast; but in faces where there is an expression of great power or of great good-humor, or both, you do not regret its absence."
He had a massive head, and features powerful and rugged, but peculiarly expressive. His face was oftentimes all aglow with emotion. He dressed badly but not cheaply; indeed, his wardrobe, Trevelyan tells us, was always enormously overstocked. "Later in life he indulged himself in an apparently inexhaustible succession of handsome embroidered waistcoats, which he used to regard with much complacency."
Among the first places to which the new lion was invited was of course the famous resort of celebrities, Holland House; and in his letters to his two younger sisters,—to whom he was always the most devoted of brothers,—he frequently narrates his experiences there. Let us glance at a few of these pictures:—
"Well, my dear, I have been to Holland House. I took a glass coach, and arrived, through a fine avenue of elms, at the great entrance about seven o'clock. The house is delightful, the very perfection of the old Elizabethan style,—a considerable number of very large and very comfortable rooms, rich with antique carving and gilding, but carpeted and furnished with all the skill of the best modern upholsterers. Lady Holland is certainly a woman of considerable talent and great acquirements. To me she was excessively courteous; yet there was a haughtiness in her courtesy which, even after all that I had heard of her, surprised me. The centurion did not keep his soldiers in better order than she keeps her guests. It is to one, 'Go,' and he goeth; and to another, 'Do this,' and it is done. 'Ring the bell, Mr. Macaulay.' 'Lay down that screen, Lord Russell; you will spoil it.' 'Mr. Allen, take a candle and show Mr. Cradock the picture of Bonaparte.' Her ladyship used me as well, I believe, as it is her way to use anybody. . . .
"I had a good deal of pleasant conversation with Rogers. He was telling me of the curiosity and interest which attached to the persons of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. When Scott dined at a gentleman's house in London not long ago, all the servant-maids in the house asked leave to stand in the passage and see him pass. He was, as you may conceive, greatly flattered. About Lord Byron, whom he knew well, he told me some curious anecdotes. When Byron passed through Florence, Rogers was there. The inn had fifty windows in front. All were crowded with women, mostly Englishwomen, to catch a glimpse of their favorite poet. Among them were some at whose houses he had been in England oftentimes, and with whom he had lived on friendly terms. He would not notice them or return their salutations. Rogers was the only person he spoke to. The worst thing that I know about Lord Byron is the very unfavorable impression which he made on men who certainly were not inclined to judge him harshly, and who were not personally ill-used by him. Sharp and Rogers both speak of him as an unpleasant, affected, splenetic person. I have heard hundreds and thousands of persons who never knew him rant about him, but I never heard a single expression of fondness for him fall from the lips of any one who knew him well. Yet even now there are those who cannot talk a quarter of an hour about Charles Fox without tears—after twenty-five years. . . .
"In the evening Lord John Russell came, and old Talleyrand. I had seen Talleyrand before. I now had the pleasure of listening to his conversation. He is certainly the greatest curiosity I ever fell in with. His head is sunk down between two high shoulders. One of his feet is hideously distorted. His face is pale as that of a corpse, and wrinkled to a frightful degree. His eyes have an odd, glassy stare. His hair, thickly powdered and pomatumed, hangs down his shoulders on each side as straight as a pound of tallow candles. His conversation, however, soon makes you forget his ugliness and infirmities."
One more glimpse of Lady Holland:—
"Her ladyship is all courtesy and kindness to me; but her demeanor to some others, particularly to poor Allen, is such as quite pains me to witness. He is really treated like a negro slave. 'Mr. Allen, go into my drawing-room and bring my reticule.' 'Mr. Allen, go and see what can be the matter that they do not bring up dinner.' 'Mr. Allen, there is not turtle-soup enough for you. You must take gravy-soup or none.' Yet I scarcely pity the man. He has an independent income, and if he can stoop to be ordered about like a footman I cannot so much blame her for the contempt with which she treats him."
Here are one or two touches of nature:—
"Get Blackwood's new number. There is a description of me in it: 'A little, splay-footed, ugly dumpling of a fellow, with a mouth from ear to ear.' Conceive how such a charge must affect a man so enamoured of his own beauty as I am."
"After the debate I walked about the streets with Bulwer till near three o'clock. I spoke to him about his novels with perfect sincerity, praising warmly and criticising freely. He took the praise as a greedy boy takes an apple-pie, and the criticism as a good, dutiful boy takes senna-tea. At all events I shall expect him to puff me well. I do not see why I should not have my puffers as well as my neighbors."
Here is a glimpse of the domestic economy of the great Holland House:—
"The dinner was not as good as usual, and her ladyship kept up a continued lamentation during the whole repast. I should never have found out that everything was not as it should be, but for her criticisms. The soup was too salt; the cutlets were not exactly comme il faut; and the pudding was hardly enough boiled. I was amused to hear from the splendid mistress of such a house the same sort of apologies which —— made when her cook forgot the joint and sent too small a dinner to table."
All these artless details were given to amuse his young sisters at home,—the beings he loved best on earth, not only at this time but throughout life. If he ever had any deeper love for another, there is no hint given of it in his life or letters. Probably for many reasons he never contemplated marriage. When he was young he was too poor to think of it; when he was older he had his own family upon his hands, and cared for them munificently to the end. He was very generous with his money and never learned the art of saving. It would seem scarcely possible that a man of his warm heart and ardent temperament could have gone through life with no romance; but if he had any such experience it has not been given to the world. He loved his sisters, and his nephews and nieces, with the most passionate devotion, and was in turn idolized by them. His nephew says:—
"It must be acknowledged that where he loved, he loved more entirely and more exclusively than was well for himself. It was improvident in him to consecrate such intensity of feeling upon relations who, however deeply they were attached to him, could not always be in a position to requite him with the whole of their time and the whole of their heart. He suffered much for that improvidence, but he was too just and kind to permit others to suffer with him; and it is not for one who obtained by inheritance a share of his inestimable affection to regret a weakness such as this."
This refers to his grief at the marriage of his sisters, which was really great and enduring. He had planned to have them in his home, and not to be in theirs; and when it turned out otherwise he could not at first be reconciled to it. His sister Nancy went out with him to India after his appointment there, and soon fell in with young Trevelyan,—to whom she became engaged, with her brother's approval but to his great grief. He calls it "a tragical denouement to an absurd plot." After the marriage they formed one household during his stay in India, and her home was to all intents and purposes his own during life. His youngest sister died during his stay abroad, and of her he thus writes:—
"The last month has been the most painful I ever went through. Indeed, I never knew before what it was to be miserable. Early in January letters from England brought me news of the death of my sister. What she was to me no words can express. I will not say that she was dearer to me than anything in the world, for my sister who was with me was equally dear; but she was as dear to me as one human being can be to another. Even now, when time has begun to do its healing work, I cannot write about her without being altogether unmanned."
His only solace was found in books. He could at any time bury himself in these and forget all the world. Probably there never was such a reader before. He devoured books like a gourmand. He read everything—Greek, Latin, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese; and books of all kinds in these languages,—history, belles-lettres, poetry, novels, old chronicles. He seemed to have a passion for all. He would read a book in an hour which it would take any one else half a day to get through in the poorest shape. And he would know what was in it, too. He read enormous quantities of novels always, and was very fond of poor ones,—none too poor for him were written at that time. It is a question whether if he had lived till this day the same thing could have been said of him. It is not recorded whether he ever encountered any of Anthony Trollope's works during his life.
If Macaulay had not been known as a great man of letters he would probably have been known as a great orator. He was, indeed, one of the best speakers of his day, and the House of Commons, that listens to so few speakers, always gave its attention to him. It seems a great pity that he should have given so many years of his life to Parliament, and to official work, when his true career undoubtedly was literature pure and simple, for which no man of his time was so splendidly equipped, both by nature and by preparation. We ought to have had from him more enduring historical works, and more of his masterly estimates of the works of other men. After his retirement into private life, in 1847, he enjoyed his freedom intensely, and much regretted that he had not obtained it sooner. He enjoyed the pleasures of society greatly at this time. He was the centre of a gifted circle of men—the most brilliant of their time—all of whom were his close friends and admirers. How brilliantly these men talked is already a matter of tradition. Macaulay was the most wonderful conversationalist, probably, since Dr. Johnson, not even excepting Carlyle, or Sydney Smith, or Coleridge. Very laughable stories are told, of course, of a man who would talk three hours without pause, and undoubtedly there were many people sadly bored by him in his day; but to those who could appreciate the remarkable stores of information he possessed, and the lucidity with which he could deal them forth,—to say nothing of his rhetorical splendors,—those discourses of his were never tedious, but full of supreme interest. To be sure, Sydney Smith sneered at his "wonderful stores of very accurate—misinformation," but he was one who did not like a rival near the throne; and in Macaulay's absence he was himself the sun around which the social universe revolved. Thackeray wrote after Macaulay's death:—
"Now that wonderful tongue is to speak no more, will not many a man grieve that he no longer can listen? To remember the talk is to wonder, to think not only of the treasures he had stored, but of the trifles which he could produce with equal readiness. What a vast, brilliant, wonderful store of learning he had; what strange lore would he not fetch at your bidding."
No report of these conversations exists, except such as is found scattered in private diaries. In these there are records of many an Attic night, and still more agreeable morning. Lord Carlisle's journal contains as many of these records, perhaps, as any one's. He makes glowing mention of Macaulay and his eloquence, after nearly every meeting of the famous circle. The only criticism he made, and it is one that was frequently made on Macaulay, was that it was remarkable what quantities of trash he remembered. He could repeat pages of the very dreariest stuff that ever was written, and was in danger of doing so on small provocation,—an infliction it must have been hard for his friends to have endured sometimes. Great stories are told of his remarkable memory,—one seldom equalled by any man. He was always willing to accept a friendly challenge to a feat of memory. One day in the board-room of the British Museum he handed to Lord Aberdeen a sheet of foolscap covered with writing arranged in parallel columns down each of the four pages. This document, on which the ink was still wet, proved to be a full list of the Senior Wranglers at Cambridge, with their dates and colleges for the hundred years during which the names of Senior Wranglers had been recorded in the University Calendar. On another occasion Sir David Dundas asked:—
"'Macaulay, do you know your Popes?' 'No,' was the answer; 'I always get wrong among the Innocents.' 'But you can say your Archbishops of Canterbury?' 'Any fool,' said Macaulay, 'could say his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards;' and he went off at a score, drawing breath only once in order to remark on some oddity."
He was easily bored in general society, and in later life rarely went beyond his little circle of intimates. Children were the only people of whom he never tired, and he was a royal companion to them always. He was unrivalled in the invention of games, and never wearied of repeating them. He had an inexhaustible repertory of small dramas for his nieces, and sustained a great variety of parts with much skill. An old friend of the family writes:—
"There was one never-failing game of building up a den with newspapers behind the sofa, and of enacting robbers and tigers; we shrieking with terror, but always begging him to begin again, of which we never grew weary."
He writes to a friend concerning Dickens, that he did not think it possible for fiction to affect him as the death of little Nell had done, and adds:—
"Have you seen the first number of 'Dombey'? There is not much in it, but there is one passage which made me cry as if my heart would break. It is the description of a little girl who has just lost her mother, and is unkindly treated by everybody. Images of that kind always overpower me even when the artist is less skilful than Dickens."
In truth, his extreme sensibility was often a great annoyance to him. He strove very hard to overcome it, but in vain; and he was moved to tears upon a great many occasions, when he would have given much to be able to control himself.
Let us quote a little more from Thackeray's tribute to him.
"All sorts of successes were easy to him. As a lad he goes down into the arena with others, and wins all the prizes to which he has a mind. A place in the Senate is straightway offered to the young man. He takes his seat there, he speaks when so minded, without party anger or intrigue, but not without party faith and a sort of heroic enthusiasm for his cause; and speech is also a success to him. Still he is a poet and philosopher even more than orator. . . . Years ago there was a wretched outcry raised because he dated a letter from Windsor Castle, where he was staying. Immortal gods! was not this man a fit guest for any palace in the world, or a fit companion for any man or woman in it? The place of such a natural chief was among the first in the land."
Macaulay died, in 1860, a sudden and painless death, and lies buried in Westminster Abbey, in the Poet's Corner, near the west wall of the South Transept, at the feet of Addison.
The British aristocracy has given to literature a few names which the world will not willingly let die. But its contribution to the world's genius has not been great in proportion to its numbers, its exceptional opportunities for culture, and the great prominence which has naturally been given to its achievements. From out its ranks have come few of the great names in English literature.
Among these the name of Lord Lytton, or Bulwer, as he is more generally known in literature, holds a prominent place. For the period of a long life he lived in the world's eye, and the world feels a great interest in the character of the man as well as in his writings.
His paternal ancestors had been settled in Norfolk since the Conquest. The name of Bulwer attests the Scandinavian origin of the Norman soldier. The great-grandfather of Edward Bulwer married the heiress of the Earles of Heydon Hall, which became the family residence. Our hero's father "contracted a romantic, if illicit, attachment to a young person of great beauty, who eloped with him from a boarding-school in which she was a teacher, and, though too haughty a man to marry beneath him, he had at least the justice to say that while she lived he would never marry any one else. And when the hand of a great and noble heiress was offered him, although a very ambitious man, he refused her upon the ground that he was not quite satisfied with the shape of her ladyship's nose." General Bulwer built for his mistress a villa in the neighborhood of London, and as he was driving into the yard on his return from some military duties which had detained him longer than usual, she ran out to meet him. In this hurried action she received a kick from one of the horses, and died of the injury.
After this, the General, who is described by his son as being of a very powerful, self-willed nature, wholly uncultivated by literature, but with that ability for action which takes lessons from life,—married the mother of our hero, a delicate girl, with intelligent, dark-blue eyes, with shy sensitive temper, passionately fond of poetry, and deeply under the influences of religion. Her family was as ancient as that of the Bulwers, the Lyttons having intermarried with many houses famous in history. But family concord was not one of the characteristics of the Lytton family, and Bulwer's grandfather and grandmother had lived stormily together for a few years, and separated by mutual consent. The essential faults are said to have been all on the side of the grandfather. The only daughter of the uncongenial pair was not permitted to dwell permanently with either. She was sent at the age of five to a large school, where she lived a sad life for a long time, without any of the tender care and affection which such a child craves, and must have, for anything like a healthful child-life. After a while she went to live with her father, and still later with her mother, from whose house she was married to General Bulwer. He was not a man who could appreciate the rarer qualities of Miss Lytton. He could have no share in her intellectual life and no sympathy with her religious nature. But the elegance of her manners satisfied his pride, her domestic habits gave him promise of a peaceful home, and, greatest merit of all, her features suited him. He liked an aquiline nose. A nose that turned up the least bit, his son tells us, would have disgusted him with a Venus. The lady's nose in this instance proving satisfactory, a happy marriage was anticipated, although the bridegroom had buried his heart in the grave of a mistress, and the bride had but partially recovered from an unhappy attachment for a man beneath herself in rank,—in fact, a merchant's son. But the marriage proved far from a happy one, and was closed after a few years by the sudden death of General Bulwer. Our hero thus writes of him:—
"Peace to thy dust, O my father! Faults thou hadst, but those rather of temper than of heart,—of deficient education and the manlike hardness of imperious will than of ungenerous disposition or epicurean corruption. If thou didst fail to give happiness to the woman whom thou didst love, many a good man is guilty of a similar failure. It had been otherwise, I verily believe, hadst thou chosen a partner of intellectual cultivation more akin to thine own,—of hardier nerve and coarser fibre,—one whom thy wrath would less have terrified, whom thy converse would more have charmed; of less moral spirit and more physical courage."
Verily we are tempted to ask when we read of this marriage—as well as of the son's own marriage and the marriages of many other members of the English aristocracy whose domestic lives have latterly seen the light of day—whether less of moral spirit and more of physical courage is not the great need among women who aspire to the peerage. Strong nerves and a martial spirit, if they could not secure peace, would at least place the combatants upon a more equal footing, and the world would be spared the spectacle of the mild-mannered and meek bullied by the overbearing and violent.
As for Bulwer himself, he had the hot blood, imperious temper, and remorseless will of the combined Bulwers and Lyttons; and, it must be added, a vanity and egotism so boundless as to be peculiarly his own, and an arrogance and superciliousness which throughout life were a constant drawback, and which interfered materially with the acknowledgment by the world of his really great powers.
At the early age of seventeen this precocious young man, who had already been several years in society, felt his first sensations of love; and he talked of it to the end of his days as being the one genuine passion of his life. He tells the pretty story very feelingly, and no doubt it was a genuine boyish romance. Hear him:—
"Ah, God! how palpably, even in hours the least friendly to remembrance, there rises before me when I close my eyes that singularly dwarfed tree which overshadowed the little stream, throwing its boughs half-way to the opposite margin. I dare not revisit that spot, for there we were wont to meet (poor children that we were!), thinking not of the world we had scarce entered, dreaming not of fate and chance, full only of our first-born, our ineffable love. It was so unlike the love of grown-up people; so pure that not one wrong thought ever crossed it, and yet so passionate that never again have I felt any emotion comparable to the intensity of its tumultuous tenderness."
When the meetings so feelingly described became known to the lady's father, she was sent away at once, and Bulwer never saw her again. Very soon after, she was forced into a marriage against which her heart protested. For three years she strove to smother the love which consumed her; and when she sunk under the conflict, and death was about to relieve her, she wrote to Bulwer informing him of the sufferings she had undergone, affirming her deathless love, and begging him to visit her grave.
His son says:—
"The impressions left on my father by this early phantom of delight were indelible and colored the whole of his afterlife. He believed that far beyond all other influences they shaped his character, and they never ceased to haunt his memory. Allusions to it are constantly recurring in all his published works, and in none of them more than in the last of all. He was much affected by them, and not knowing to what they referred, we wondered that the creations of his fancy should exercise such power over him. They were not creations of fancy, but the memories of fifty years past."
After the abrupt end of his first romance he conceived a sort of friendship for Lady Caroline Lamb, which came very near the verge of love. Lady Caroline was between thirty and forty years old at this time, it being subsequent to her intrigue with Lord Byron. She looked much younger than her age,—thanks, perhaps, to a slight rounded figure and a child-like mode of wearing her pale golden hair in loose curls. She had large hazel eyes, good teeth, and a pleasant laugh. She had to a surpassing degree the qualities that charm, and never failed to please. Her conversation was remarkable, and she was the only woman, Byron said, who never bored him. She was a creature of caprice, and impulse, and whim, and had been known to send a page around to all her guests at Brocket at three o'clock in the morning to say that she was playing the great organ on the staircase, and requested the pleasure of their company. And it is added that the invitation was never refused, and that daylight would find them listening, spellbound and without a thought of bed. Here is Bulwer's own account of the close of this little episode with Lady Caroline. He was staying at her house, and had become very jealous of a Mr. Russell.
"I went downstairs. Russell sat opposite me. He wore a ring. It was one which Lord Byron had given Lady Caroline: one which was to be worn only by those she loved. I had often worn it myself. She had wanted me to accept it, but I would not, because it was so costly. And now he wore it. Can you conceive my resentment, my wretchedness? After dinner I threw myself upon a sofa. Music was playing. Lady Caroline came to me. 'Are you mad?' said she. I looked up. The tears stood in my eyes. I could not have spoken a word for the world. What do you think she said aloud? 'Don't play this melancholy air,—it affects Mr. Bulwer so that he is actually weeping.' My tears, my softness, my love were over in a moment. When we broke up in the evening I said to her, 'Farewell forever. It is over. Now I see you in your true light. Instead of jealousy I only feel contempt. Farewell. Go and be happy.'"
This account reads very much like a page from "Pelham" or "Devereux," and the whole account of his affairs of the heart is written in a similar manner.
All this had passed before he was twenty-two. At that age he first met Rosina Wheeler, at an evening party. He was talking busily to his mother when she suddenly exclaimed: "O Edward, what a singularly beautiful face! Do look. Who can she be?"
An elderly gentleman was leading through the room in which they sat a young lady of remarkable beauty, who, from the simplicity of her costume, seemed to be unmarried. He turned his head languidly, as he says, with a strangely troubled sensation, and beheld his fate before him,—in other words, his future wife.
Rosina Wheeler was at this time twenty-three, and in the full blossom of a very remarkable beauty. Her father was an Irish squire, who at the age of seventeen had married a very beautiful girl two years younger than himself. The natural result of this marriage was a separation, after the birth of two children, one of them the future Lady Lytton. Domestic infelicity seems to have been the heritage of every one connected with the Bulwer family even in the remotest manner.
And now it appears again in the family of the woman to whom the latest scion of the old house is to be united. Bulwer's mother opposed the match strenuously from the first. Her pride, her prudence, her forebodings, and her motherly susceptibilities all rose up against it. And she never gave her consent to it, or became really reconciled to it after it had taken place. Although very unwilling to displease his mother in so vital a matter, Bulwer seems to have gone steadily on to such a consummation; not borne away certainly by strong passion, but rather influenced, it would seem, by a tender regard for the feelings of Miss Wheeler, who had grown much attached to him. Not without many a struggle with himself, however, did he yield. He was tenderly attached to his mother, and it was a great grief to him to do so important a thing without her approval; and, moreover, his income and all his worldly prospects depended upon her. He does not seem to have been particularly happy over his own prospects, for in one of the last letters he wrote before marriage he says:—
"My intended is very beautiful, very clever, very good; but, alas! the human heart is inscrutable. I love and am loved. My heart is satisfied, my judgment, too. And still I am wretched."
There have been published within a few years a great number of the love-letters written by Bulwer to Miss Wheeler about this time. His son publishes none of them in the late biography, and it is safe to say that in all the range of literature there are no other letters filled with such drivelling idiocy as these. Had they been written by some Cockney coachman to some sentimental housemaid, they should stand as the finest specimens of that grade of literature extant; but that they should have been written by one of the foremost literary men of his time is a marvel, and seems to show to what extremes of imbecility love may reduce even wise men. As for Lady Lytton herself, one cares to know little more than that she could have married a man who habitually addressed her as his "sugar-plum," his "tootsy-wootsy," and his "sweety-weety." A woman clothed and in her right mind, who could deliberately accept such a personage for a life-long companion, calls for small sympathy from a matter-of-fact world, unless, indeed, it be that we bestow our sympathy simply upon the grounds of her feeble-mindedness.
In less than three years began the vulgar quarrels which finally ended the marriage. Bulwer is described by a visitor to the house about this time as appearing "like a man who has been flayed and is sore all over." His temperament was by nature extremely sensitive and irritable. And the combined Bulwer and Lytton blood was hot, turbulent, and at times quite uncontrollable. There are records of scenes of absolute personal violence against his wife, and one instance is given where at dinner, during the momentary absence of the servant, he bit her cheek till the blood flowed freely. After marriage, his income being cut off by his mother, he for a time wrote for his bread; and the work, close and confining as it was, told very much upon his health.
"His feelings became morbidly acute, and all the petty household worries were to his exasperated brain what frictions and jostlings are to highly inflamed flesh. His wife had little of his society. He was nearly always writing or making preparation for writing, and when they were together his nervous irritability vented itself at every unwelcome circumstance in complaints, or taunts, or fits of anger. To harsh words and unjust reproaches his wife returned meek replies. Any distress his conduct occasioned her she concealed from him. She was studious to please him, and endeavored to anticipate every want and wish. Her gentleness and forbearance increased his gratitude and devotion to her, and whenever he perceived that she was wounded he was full of remorse."
So says her son, and continues:—
"The mischief was aggravated by the unfortunate occurrence that my mother being unable to suckle her first-born child, it had been nursed out of the house. Her maternal instinct, thus thwarted in its origin, never revived. The care of children was ever after distasteful to her. Losing this satisfaction to her affections, unless she had company in the house she was lonely. As it was, neither of them saw the issue to which the divided life was tending."
That issue, as all the world knows, was a separation of the husband and wife, and a life-long quarrel of almost unimagined bitterness. No wonder that Bulwer's hand faltered when be tried to write of it, and that, having brought his autobiography up to this point, he laid it by, not daring to go on. He always cherished the intention of resuming it, but could never bring himself to the point of doing so. He could not tell the story; but Lady Lytton could, and did, continuing to do so till her dying day. The picture of her which her son has given does not seem like that of a woman who would do all the things which she notoriously did. But doubtless she had her amiable and engaging side, and was half maddened by her wrongs. Justin McCarthy says:—
"I do not know whether I ought to call it a quarrel. Can that be called a quarrel, piteously asks the man in 'Juvenal,' where my enemy only beats and I am beaten? Can that be called a quarrel in which, so far as the public could judge, the wife did all the denunciation, and the husband made no reply? Lady Lytton wrote novels for the purpose of satirizing her husband and his friends,—his parasites, she called them. Lady Lytton attributed to her husband the most odious meannesses, vices, and cruelties; but the public, with all its love of scandal, seems to have steadfastly refused to take her ladyship's word for these accusations. Dickens she denounced and vilified as a mere parasite and sycophant of her husband. Disraeli she caricatured under the title of Jericho Jabber. This sort of thing she kept always going on. Sometimes she issued pamphlets to the women of England, calling on them to take up her quarrel, which, somehow, they never did. Once, when Sir Edward was on the hustings addressing his constituents at a county election, her ladyship suddenly appeared, mounted the platform, and 'went' for him. I do not know anything of the merits of the quarrel, but have always thought that something like insanity must have been the explanation of much of her conduct. But it is beyond doubt that her husband's conduct was remarkable for its quiet, indomitable patience and dignity."
Let the veil drop over the blighted lives, knowing as we do that the human heart is so dark and intricate a labyrinth that we cannot claim to understand it by half knowledge, and that however we might judge these two with any light which we can possibly have in our day, we should be in danger of doing each a grievous wrong.
It is related by Miss Thackeray that the grandfather of Alfred Tennyson, when that poet was young, asked him to write an elegy on his grandmother, who had recently died, and when it was written gave him ten shillings, with the remark, "There, that is the first money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take my word for it, it will be the last." How little he foresaw at that time the fame and fortune which the youth's poetry was to bring him, and the lasting honor he was to bestow upon the family name! That name was already an honorable one, for the Tennysons were an old family, and had good blood in their veins. The home was the old rectory of Somersby, where George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., held sway in the old-time priestly fashion for a lifetime. He is described as a man of strong character and high principle, full of accomplishments, and gifted withal; a strikingly handsome man, with impressive manners. Twelve children were given to his hands, of whom Alfred was the third. The eldest, Frederick, and the second, Charles, were both poets, and not without merit,—especially Charles, who published a volume of sonnets, which gave great pleasure to so good a judge as Coleridge; and the Laureate is himself very fond of his brother's work.
The children led a very free and unconstrained life in that beautiful part of Lincolnshire, and had a few friends to whom they attached themselves for life. Arthur Hallam was Alfred's intimate, and later on he became engaged to one of his sisters. Young Hallam's early death was the first shadow upon their lives. But who would not willingly die at twenty-three to be immortalized in such a poem as "In Memoriam"?
Of Arthur Hallam's own quality as a poet we get a pleasant glimpse in the sonnet addressed to his betrothed when he began to teach her Italian:—
"Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome,
Ringing with echoes of Italian song;
Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong,
And all the pleasant place is like a home.
Hark, on the right, with full piano tone,
Old Dante's voice encircles all the air;
Hark yet again, like flute-tones mingling rare
Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan.
Pass thou the lintel freely; without fear
Feast on the music. I do better know thee
Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me
Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear."
After Tennyson had made his first literary successes, and after the family life at Somersby was broken up, we next hear of him through a warm and life-long friend. Away back in 1844 Carlyle in one of his letters to Emerson gives the following description of the then young and rising poet. It is an authentic glimpse of the real man, as he then appeared to one of the shrewdest and most critical of the men of that day.
"Tennyson is now in town, and means to come and see me. Of this latter result I shall be very glad: Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures (a not increasing number I think) who are and remain beautiful to me,—a true human soul, or some approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother! However, I doubt he will not come; he often skips me, in these brief visits to Town; skips everybody indeed, being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom,—carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos!
"Alfred is the son of a Lincolnshire Gentleman Farmer, I think; indeed, you see in his verses that he is a native of 'moated granges,' and green fat pastures, not of mountains and their torrents and storms. He had his breeding at Cambridge, as if for the Law or Church; being master of a small annuity, on his Father's decease, he preferred clubbing, with his mother and some sisters, to live unpromoted and write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here, now there; the family always within reach of London, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade's rooms. I think he must be under forty, not much under it. One of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive, yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic,—fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet in these decades such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic—his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon."
To this graphic description little need be added of the Tennyson of that time. He was in the midst of his greatest literary successes, and just beginning to reap some of the rewards of his labors. His fame increased rapidly from that time forward, and his fortune with his fame. For many years he has been a rich man, being a sharp and shrewd manager of his worldly affairs. His investments have always proved to be paying ones; and for a long time he has had whatever prices he named for his poems. He has a beautiful place at Farringford, Isle of Wight, and another country seat at Aldworth, in Surrey. He also owns a house in London, although he spends very little time there. He kept up his visits to the Carlyles during his occasional stays in the metropolis, until the death of his old friends. He was very fond of Mrs. Carlyle, her sharp wit amusing him, and her appreciation of his own work flattering him. She gives occasional pleasant mention of him in her letters. Over his later work Carlyle was not enthusiastic, although he retained his friendship for the man. In 1867, after the death of his wife, he gives us his last glimpse of the poet, which is as characteristic as the other:—
"We read at first Tennyson's 'Idyls,' with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of vacancy—and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson's 'English Traits;' and read that with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing heaven that there were still books for grown-up people too."
According to Carlyle, what Tennyson needed was a Task; and wanting that, he almost lost his way among the will-o'-wisps. High art, in the eyes of Carlyle, was but a poor "task" for a man like Tennyson. Upon this point the world will not be likely to agree with him, nor in his judgment of the wonderful "Idyls of the King." Although Tennyson, like Carlyle himself, has written too far into the shadows of age, he will not be judged by the labors of his old age, but by the matchless products of his prime. These are surely a priceless possession for the readers of the future, as well as for the men of his own time.
In the autobiography of Sir Henry Taylor we have this glimpse of the poet, in a letter from Mrs. Cameron to that gentleman:—
"Alfred has grown, he says, much fonder of you since your last visit here. He says he feels now he is beginning to know you and not to feel afraid of you; and that he is beginning to get over your extreme insolence to him when he was young and you were in your meridian splendor and glory. So one reads your simplicity. He was very violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for autographs. He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world was connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records; that the desiring anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs, to be ripped open for the public; that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and that the world knew nothing, of Shakspeare but his writings."
All of which sounds not unlike what Carlyle himself might have said in those days; and yet what personal revelations he made to the world before his death!
The news that Lord Tennyson is writing his autobiography may be sent by cable almost any day now, and the world will not receive it with any great surprise, but with very great interest and pleasure. This dislike of being lionized and overrun by celebrity hunters is probably one great reason why the poet prefers the solitude of the country to a residence in London. His servants and family guard him very securely from unwelcome visitors in his country home. The injunctions against disturbing him while at his work are so strong, that one day during the life of Prince Albert that distinguished attaché of royalty was refused admittance at the door. The poet formed a friendship with the Prince, however, later in life, and is now an occasional visitor to the Queen at Windsor. He is also a favorite with the Princess of Wales and other members of the royal family. But even such august friends as these do not draw him often from his solitude. Mr. Gladstone begs him in vain for a visit, and his invitations to the houses of the great lords are of course many and importunate; but of late he refuses them all. He says he will never again voluntarily pass a week in London, and he is not more fond of visits to country houses than to the city. Nor can we wonder much at this. He has never been a society man, and now that he is old, and growing somewhat feeble, the effort to conform to the demands of a conventional life is harder than ever. He tried taking a house in London and spending the season there, not many years ago, but wearied of it very quickly, and gave up the idea forever. While in London at that time he always appeared in public in the picturesque wide-awake hat of the Italian bandit, and always, even in warm weather, wore a cloak. The costume is very becoming, and the poet can afford to indulge his individual tastes in the matter of dress; so everybody said how poetical he looked, and, on the whole, his eccentricity was a success. He has always had a great contempt for the conventionalities of dress, and many laughable anecdotes have been told concerning his appearance at the Isle of Wight. When young he was really handsome, though he always wore his hair long, and looked as if he would be the better for a barber; but now he is very gray and wizened, stoops badly, and shows that he has smoked, as Carlyle said, infinite tobacco. Tennyson has always exercised a judicious hospitality, but never overburdened himself with company. His favorite time for guests is from Saturday until Monday, and those who are so fortunate as to be invited enjoy very greatly the distinction. Among his favorite guests is Henry Irving. A few years before his death Garibaldi paid the poet a visit, which was much enjoyed by both. Years ago, when the poet was more in London than now, a little knot of literary friends had a standing engagement to dine together once a month, and the parties were almost the ideal of unconventional friendliness. Among the number were Carlyle, Cunningham, Mill, Thackeray, Forster, Stirling, Landor, and Macready. Here the conversation was of the best, Carlyle always coming out strong, and all the rest content to listen. However, Carlyle, unlike many great conversers, never monopolized the conversation. It was always dialogue and not monologue with Carlyle in any mixed company, though he would discourse at length to one or two visitors. Tennyson, like many men of letters, loves to talk about his own work, and is very fond of reading his poems to his friends. This is, of course, very delightful to those friends, if the reading be not too prolonged, although he is said to chant them in rather a disagreeable manner. He is a great egotist, and does not like to listen to other people when they talk about themselves. We are told that Charles Sumner once paid him a visit, and bored him very much by a long talk upon American affairs in which Tennyson took no interest. When Sumner finally made a sufficient pause, Tennyson changed the subject by inquiring if his visitor had ever read "The Princess." Sumner replied that it was one of his favorite poems, whereupon Tennyson handed him the book and asked him to read. Sumner began, but was soon stopped by Tennyson, who wished to show him how a passage should be read. He went on reading aloud in his high nasal voice, until Sumner grew very weary, but did not dare to move for fear of being thought unappreciative. On and on read the poet, page after page, never making a moment's pause or giving Sumner any chance to escape, until he had read the whole poem. It is said that Sumner never dared pay him another visit. Being a decided egotist himself, it was painfully hard for the distinguished American to subordinate himself for so long a time, and his friends amused themselves very much at the idea.
Tennyson undoubtedly has a high opinion of his work; but he does not go quite to the length of Wordsworth in such self-admiration, as Wordsworth would read no poetry but his own, while Tennyson is a generous admirer of the work of fellow-poets.
Tennyson's married life has been one of the happiest on record. He addresses his wife in these lines:—
"Dear, near, and true—no truer Time himself
Can prove you, though he make you evermore
Dearer and nearer."
One cannot think, when he witnesses the devotion of the poet to his wife, that he ever regrets the "Amy shallow-hearted," the "Amy mine no more," of his youth; and the reader certainly cannot regret her, if it is really to her that we owe "Locksley Hall." Mrs. Tennyson has been something of an invalid, and the poet and his sons, Hallam and Lionel, may often be seen wheeling her on the lawn at Farringford. Of the house at Farringford Miss Thackeray, who is an old friend of the family, as was her father before her, tells us:—
"The house itself seemed like a charmed palace, with green walls without and speaking walls within. There hung Dante with his solemn nose and wreath; Italy gleamed over the doorways; friends' faces lined the way; books filled the shelves, and a glow of crimson was everywhere; the great oriel window in the drawing-room was full of green and golden leaves, of the sound of birds, and of the distant sea."
She continues:—
"I first knew the place in the autumn, but perhaps it is even more beautiful in spring-time, when all day the lark trills high overhead, and then when the lark has flown out of our hearing the thrushes begin, and the air is sweet with scents from the many fragrant shrubs. The woods are full of anemones and primroses; narcissus grows wild in the lower fields; a lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels; hyacinth-pools of blue shine in the woods; and then with a later burst of glory comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about, and blazing round about the beacon hill. The beacon hill stands behind Farringford. If you follow the little wood of nightingales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the blackthorn hedges shine in spring-time (lovely dials that illuminate to show the hour), you come to the downs, and climbing their smooth steps you reach 'Mr. Tennyson's Down,' where the beacon-staff stands firm upon the mound. Then following the line of the coast you come at last to the Needles, and may look down upon the ridge of rocks that rises crisp, sharp, shining, out of the blue wash of fierce delirious waters."
Since Tennyson's elevation to the peerage there has been an infinite amount of squibbing at his expense, and some very good parodies upon his poems have been circulated. The "Pall Mall Gazette" parodies "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" thus:—
"Baron Alfred Vere de Vere,
Of me you win no new renown:
You thought to daze the country-folk
And cockneys when you came to town.
See Wordsworth, Shelley, Cowper, Burns,
Withdraw in scorn, and sit retired;
The last of some six hundred earls
Is not a place to be desired.
"Baron Alfred Vere de Vere,
We thought you proud to bear your name;
Your pride is yet no mate for ours,
Too proud to think a title fame.
We had the genius—not the lord;
We love the poet's truer charms,
A simple singer with his dreams
Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms."
And so on to the close:—
"Alfred, Alfred Vere de Vere,
If time be heavy on your hands,
Are there no toilers in our streets,
Nor any poor in all these lands?
Oh, teach the weak to strive and hope;
Oh, teach the great to help the low;
Pray Heaven for a noble heart,
And let the foolish title go."
There was undoubtedly much disappointment that Tennyson did not refuse the title bestowed upon him, as he had previously declined to be knighted, and was looked upon as something of a liberal. He probably was this when young, judging by some things in his writings; but he is now looked upon as a tory of the tories.
Tennyson has probably received higher prices for his poems than any other poet. When he was paid ten pounds a line for "Sea Dreams," it was considered a fabulous price; but he has received much more than that since.
During his long literary life—for he has been writing over fifty years—he has of course written a great deal; yet he is very slow and laborious in composition, and spends much time in rewriting and polishing. The garden song in "Maud" was rewritten fifty times, and almost as great labor has been given to other famous bits of writing. He was seventeen years in writing "In Memoriam," and he brought it almost to perfection of finish; but he has spent laborious years upon poems which are comparative failures. After the inspiration has waned, or if the inspiration is wanting in the first place, the pains taken in revision go for little in the making of a poem which will live. Given the inspiration, and the labor usually, though not always, adds to its chances for immortality. Tennyson, with all his fastidious delicacy in writing, is a robust, manly man,—strong, healthy, active, fond of out-of-door life, and not greatly given to study. He spends whole days in the open air, and has all an Englishman's fondness for walking. He is martial in spirit, too, and rejoices in the heroic deeds of his countrymen. He can write a spirited war song, as he proved a few years ago when he thrilled all England with the lyric:—
"Form, form, riflemen, form;
Ready, be ready to meet the storm."
On the whole, Tennyson must be said to have had a very prosperous and well-ordered life. He has enjoyed more of the blessings of this world than almost any one of his famous contemporaries; and his name is likely to live after that of most of the others shall have passed away. He has had the appreciation and the applause of all of the great men of his time, and the friendship of such as he desired; and his old age is full of honor, and ministered unto by loving and faithful hands. May it still be long before an admiring world shall read at the end of his life's story the words, "In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson."