Alfred and Arthur
an historic friendship
by
Garrett Jones
CONTENTS
I
II
I: The founding of a friendship
1
The subject prescribed for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English Verse at the University of Cambridge in 1829 was a poem to be entitled Timbuctoo. If the subject was less than alluring the prize was sufficiently prestigious to attract quite a crop of entrants, including an ambitious seventeen-year-old who had recently arrived at Trinity. He was a reckless young man, whose gambling debts would soon compel him to flee the University. His entry, a burlesque about the eating of missionaries and their hymn books, was not appreciated by the assessors although it did pave the way for a lifelong friendship with the eventual prize-winner. If this candidate found no favour as a poet, his novels would soon make a rather imposing name - William Makepeace Thackaray - also illustrious.
Alfred and Arthur, also at Trinity, were more serious contenders for the poetry prize, one of them destined to win it. The two had scarcely met when the April deadline for submissions arrived. Arthur, just five months older than Thackaray, had become eighteen that February; Alfred would be twenty in August.
Although the two had already spent six months in the same college, they had seen almost nothing of each other until now. This was largely because Arthur had a room in college whilst Alfred, to save cash, lodged in the town with his two brothers, hardly ever dining in hall. He had come up with brother Charles at the end of 1827 to join Frederick, the eldest, who had recently transferred from St John’s to Trinity. In the autumn of 1828 a fourth Tennyson, cousin George Hildeyard, arrived at Trinity. He had no money worries and had been advised by his father not to have too much to do with his less civilised cousins.
When Alfred walked off with the prize, Arthur could justly claim that it had been his idea to persuade Alfred that a youthful, pre-Cambridge poem he had called Armageddon could, with a little judicious editing, form the basis for a poem called Timbuctoo. Their joint candidature for the prize had already made them the firmest of friends.
Less than two months before this, Arthur had written to his great friend of Eton days, William Ewart Gladstone, now at St John’s, Oxford, that, apart from Frere, a mutual Eton friend, he had so far failed to find a true friend at Trinity:
There are many, very many, whom I like, and esteem; but in the higher point I am difficult to please.
[This and all other excerpts from Arthur's letters are quoted from The Letters of Arthur H. Hallam, edited by Jack Kolb]By June, another ex-Eton friend also now at Oxford, James Gaskell, was telling his friends that a chap called Alfred Tennyson had apparently become ‘a great friend of Hallam’s’.
When Arthur wrote to Gladstone again in September, he reminded him that it was now two years since they had met. He thanked his friend for being kind about ‘my queer piece of work about Timbuctoo’, adding that it was not really a patch on ‘my friend Tennyson’s poem, which got the prize.’ Perhaps in order to demonstrate that friendship had not been allowed to cloud his critical faculty he conceded that
....to say the truth by striking out his prose argument the Examiners had done all in their power to verify the concluding words "All was night"....
But what he went on to say struck Gladstone, to the end of his life, as the death knell of their own friendship.
Arthur had continued:
....The splendid imaginative power that pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century
.Alfred would have loved this assessment of him. He himself grew increasingly critical of the poem that had secured the prize and begun to establish his reputation. He saw it as contrived and ulterior, marred by all kinds of imperfection. But Arthur’s unshakeable faith in his imaginative power and poetic prospects must have thrilled him to the core.
There were things about Arthur which Alfred found equally awe-inspiring. Alfred was short-sighted and often did not have a very clear impression of people unless and until he really scrutinised them, which he did not scruple to do if he became interested in something about that person. When he first took a close look at Arthur, he knew that something momentous had happened. Shortly afterwards, he gave Arthur a poem containing these lines:
So, friend, when first I looked upon your face
..
Alfred was destined to become the grand old man of Victorian literary England, his life being framed by the first and last decades of the century; Arthur would be dead in little more than four years.
In some ways they were the least likely of friends. Their backgrounds and earlier experiences had been about as different as they could have been. Yet, by the extraordinary chemistry that had established such instant rapport between them, and by the still more extraordinary determination with which Alfred refused to let their friendship die even when Arthur had died, this was to become the most famous friendship of the century. Alfred’s private grief, haunted by Arthur's ghostly presence, was to become public property and a chief source of solace for a queen crippled by bereavement.
2
Before he met Arthur, Alfred had been terribly homesick. His father could never have afforded to send him here without help from his sister, Elizabeth, who, by marrying a certain Major Russell, had jointly inherited one of the wealthiest estates in the country. Unlike some other members of the family, she had always liked Alfred and had been one of the first to spot his budding genius. Although she was never prodigal in her generosity, her background support and belief in him were major stabilising influences in the young poet’s otherwise tumultuous early life.
All the same, it was no joke having to leave a country parsonage for this strange world where ‘dry-headed, calculating, angular little gentlemen’, most from public schools, made him feel very much a fish out of water. This was the first time he had been outside his native Lincolnshire. He seemed now to have arrived on a different planet.
What particularly appalled him was the heartlessness and pettiness of academia. He wrote a poem, never published, about the Cambridge of 1830, in which he castigated
........you that do profess to teach
The one thing that helped to compensate for all this was that, even before he got that coveted Gold Medal, before he had even arrived at Cambridge, he was already a ‘published poet’. This meant something at Cambridge. Byron had been here at Trinity just twenty years ahead of him. He had been Alfred’s boyhood hero until his brother, Frederick, coaxed him into the Shelley camp. Before Byron, there had been Milton at Christ’s College and, before him, Edmund Spenser at Pembroke. Unlikely as it seemed, Cambridge was actually a nursery of poets.
Alfred had got into print just the year before he arrived at Trinity, when he was only seventeen. A printer in Louth, the nearest town to his home at Somersby, had agreed to publish Poems by Two Brothers in 1826. There were a hundred and three poems in the volume, forty-two by Alfred, fifty-seven by Charles and the remaining four by Frederick, an unacknowledged third brother. All three of them were now here in Cambridge.
But Alfred took his poetry a bit more seriously than his brothers; capturing the poetry prize had seemed to prove the point. Some of his more interesting and original work, poems like Armageddon and The Devil and the Lady, had been excluded from the published volume because they had been regarded as ‘too much out of the common for the public taste.’ At any rate, he and Charles had each received £10 from the printer for the poems, such a generous sum for such a dubious business proposition that some suspected that Aunt Elizabeth had been subsidising the volume behind the scenes. If this was the case, the two brothers were blissfully unaware of it. They used the money to have a day trip to Mablethorpe, where Alfred danced on the dunes, broadcasting his poems to the winds at the top of his voice.
Alfred’s general education had been somewhat unorthodox. At seven, he had left the local primary school to go with Charles to Louth Grammar, where the headmaster was one Revd. J. Waite, a bullying tyrant. When reports of his maltreatment of his boys reached the Revd. Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, Rector of Somersby, he decided to withdraw them and teach them himself. This decision was made in 1820, the year that big brother, Frederick, then aged thirteen, had gone off to Eton.
This, as it happened, was the beginning of the link between the Tennysons and the Hallams. Frederick took so well to his new environment that he was soon made a member of the Eton Society because of his debating prowess and eventually became school captain. Arthur, who was four years his junior, had only known him by sight but, in May 1827, when Frederick had gone off to Cambridge, Arthur, in his last year at school, was editing the Eton Miscellany and had written to his friends, Farr and Frere (now also at Cambridge), to try to persuade ‘Tennyson and others’ to send him something for the Miscellany. Frederick had left behind him quite a reputation as a poet. Arthur did not know at this point that he would soon be at Cambridge himself.
There were seven Tennyson boys but only money enough to send one of them to Eton. Frederick was no more talented than any of the others but, being the eldest, the Rector regarded this as his privilege. He had his own reasons for being particularly touchy about the rights of the senior son.
The Rector, George Clayton Tennyson, was born in 1778, the third child in three years, but he was the first boy. It was another six years before Charles, his younger brother, was born. The older sisters were Elizabeth and Mary respectively.
Their father was another George, a property lawyer who had become adviser to many local landowners and had himself become extremely wealthy by making shrewd investments in the new Grimsby docks and associated fishing industry. His own wealth had compounded when, in 1775, he had married Mary Turner, a local lady of considerable means. The joint fortune had enabled him to buy Bayons Manor, an imposing estate above Tealby, in the Wolds, in addition to his numerous smaller properties.
Alfred’s grandfather, George senior, was unaffectionately known as ‘the old man of the Wolds’ to the Somersby branch of the family. As the Rector had told them many times, he had been dispossessed by his younger brother. This is because George senior, as he grew wealthier, became increasingly obsessed by dynastic and social ambition. Bayons had originally belonged to a medieval family named d’Eyncourt and George had managed to convince himself that he was in fact descended from this very family. In any case, when his own father, Michael Tennyson, had married Elizabeth Clayton, he was marrying a woman whose mother descended from the aristocratic Hildeyard family, thus conferring status as well as wealth. With lineage like the supposed d’Eyncourt connection and the Hildeyards, the question of succession became all-important to him.
There was a fly in the ointment however. Along with wealth and status, there was also ‘bad blood’. The first son had been christened George Clayton in deference to the less dubitably aristocratic side of the family, but the male, ‘Clayton’ side of that family seemed to carry a gene which tended towards epilepsy, depression and even insanity. George senior was in any case afflicted with ‘fits’ and unpredictable mood swings. To his horror, his eldest son, George Clayton, showed early signs of having inherited ‘petit mal’. To make matter worse, he was also a rather ungainly, clumsy kind of boy.
When Charles, the second son, was born, although he resembled George in some points, he was altogether a more handsome and attractive lad and showed no signs of epilepsy. The father became increasingly certain that Charles, not George, was the boy to succeed him. Ironically, Charles too turned out to have inherited ‘petit mal’ and had passed it on to his own son, the Charles Hildeyard who turned up at Trinity the year after Alfred.
To make matters worse, George Clayton became convinced that his father had no trace of affection for him. He had been bundled off to granddad Tennyson at Holderness when he was still a young boy. On the rare occasions when he saw his father, he was subjected to humiliating ridicule. It was, in fact, in 1820, the very year when the Rector sent his own eldest son to Eton, that he also wrote to his father, telling him for the first time how deeply he had felt the lack of love and the many slights which had been inflicted on him.
The rift between father and son deepened when George senior procured the benefice of Benniworth in 1791, making it clear that this was for his eldest son, then only thirteen, as soon as he was old enough to enter a country parsonage. The second son, Charles, would remain at home as heir apparent. Ten years later, as soon as George Clayton had finished at Cambridge, the father insisted that he be ordained deacon, in spite of his son’s protestations that he had no calling at all for the priesthood. George was allowed an eighteen-month trip to Russia before being installed as the reluctant Rector of Somersby. The new incumbent was an erudite man whose sermons filled his flock with uncomprehending awe and whose lifestyle seemed strangely wild and unparsonic.
From Alfred’s point of view, his father was a big improvement on the bullying parson at Louth. He found him ‘an inspiring if exacting teacher’ even if his health was steadily deteriorating and his moods growing more alarming as he became increasingly dependent on alcohol, then laudanum. By the time Alfred left for Cambridge, his father was taking forty drops of laudanum a day and having as many as three fits a night.
In spite of this handicap, the Rector had been awarded a doctorate of Civil Laws in 1813 in recognition of his scholarship. The boys had the run of their father’s library, which was well stocked in the fields of history, travel and the classics. Alfred spent hours browsing amongst these volumes. He later felt that his hypochondria stemmed from poring over two great medical tomes which convinced him that he must be suffering from ‘all the diseases in the world’.
In order to impose some kind of discipline on an otherwise highly disorganised regime, the Rector insisted on a daily stint of Horace, whom Alfred came to hate. He was much more respectful about his father’s own poetry, the reading of which built a bridge between the two generations. Alfred would try to get his father off the classics so that he would talk about English verse, about which he was knowledgeable. George quickly spotted that Alfred had unusual talent. After reading one of his early poems, he declared, ‘If Alfred die, one of our greatest poets will have gone.’ He did everything he could to feed this natural gift and Alfred never forgot some of his advice - like the need to break the rhythm of verse occasionally in order to avoid monotony.
His father’s high opinion of his verse did much to bolster Alfred’s self-confidence and helped give birth to a secret ambition. Arthur, a brother five years his junior, remembered strolling with Alfred when they were boys. As they roamed the lanes around Somersby, they started speculating about their respective futures. Alfred suddenly said, with great emphasis, ‘Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous.’
Alfred could not remember a time when words failed to thrill him. Before he could even read, he would go out on a stormy day and shout, ‘I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind.’ Certain words, especially the phrase, ‘far, far away’, could cast a spell over him.
His prowess developed rapidly. He could write presentable blank verse by the time he was eight. Within two years he could do a passable imitation of Pope. In his early teens, he had written a 6,000 line epic in the style of Scott and was avidly reading Malory’s Arthurian legends. He was reading Byron when he was fourteen and writing a verse satire in the style of Ben Jonson, but with some indebtedness to Shakespeare and Milton. He never finished this but it was good enough to be deemed worthy of publication (as The Devil and the Lady) in 1930. Benjamin Jowett, who later became a great friend of Alfred’s, could never get over the precocity of these early poems. ‘They are most original,’ he proclaimed, ‘and it is wonderful how the whelp could have known such things.’
In 1805, the twenty-five-year-old Rector had married Elizabeth Fytche, the beautiful daughter of the Rector of Louth. Warm and easy-going, she had a keen appreciation of poetry and music and was as keen as her husband to encourage any sign of talent in these directions in her children, who were born at the rate of almost one a year until 1819. Her first son, born in 1806 and christened George, died almost immediately. Fred, born a year later, was the only child not to have a ‘foreign’ look. He wrote verse as a boy and youth but later became more interested in music. Charles, born in 1808, also became a clergyman, a fact which Arthur Hallam was to lament as having deprived Britain of a not inconsiderable poet. Charles also followed his father by his spells of drug dependency. The younger children, especially the boys, showed deeper signs of having inherited the paternal ‘bad blood’, aggravated by their father’s rapidly deteriorating health.
If his parishioners found the Rector strange, they found his offspring even stranger. The children were mostly tall and dark, with wild manners and an olive, often beautiful, ‘Mediterranean’ complexion. One of the Tennyson forbears had married a relation of Madame de Maintenon, which possibly accounted for this un-English appearance, though it might also have had something to do with the Fytche side of the family. At any rate, Alfred’s features and manner were often to be described as ‘Spanish’ or ‘Italian’. His habit of wearing a cape and a broad-brimmed Spanish hat from 1830 onwards did nothing to diminish this impression.
As children, some of the young Tennysons thought nothing of roaming the lanes throughout the night. Neither parent thought this peculiar, although it confirmed the ‘old man of the Wolds’, when he got to hear of such wildness, in his conviction that George Clayton, if he could not control his own children better, would have been a most unsuitable heir - and would have put paid to the peerage on which he had now, vainly, set his heart.
When Alfred’s father died, in 1831, the grandfather felt he had to shoulder some responsibility for the eleven surviving children. He summoned Mary and Arthur, aged twenty-one and sixteen respectively, to Bayons Manor in order to assess their prospects. He found Arthur’s gestures and twitchings ridiculous and Mary remembered him shaking his head and muttering, ‘they are all strangely brought up.’
But Somersby was not Bayons. Although the rectory had been extended, there were times when the children had to sleep five or six to a room. If they were deprived of privacy and the more genteel graces, they gained a great deal from having to inter-relate so intensively. At the age of eleven, Alfred might have the three-year-old Cecilia on his knee, the six-year-old Arthur and seven-year-old Matilda at his side and the year-old Horatio at his feet whilst he held them all spellbound with his tales of knights and their heroic deeds. He had inherited his father’s fine musical voice and had a natural aptitude for drama, which found scope when the children performed ‘old English plays’, which they quite frequently did.
As the Rector’s health grew steadily worse, his moods, always unpredictable, became darker and more lowering, sometimes so frightening that Alfred remembered running off to the cemetery on one occasion and praying for death. The tension at home had become unbearable at such times and left Alfred with a strong conviction of the malignity of fate. When he badly wanted something to happen, he would try to cheat fate by going off on his own, flinging out his arms, and shouting, ‘I know it won’t! I know it won’t!’
Things came to a head at the end of 1828 when Alfred had been at Cambridge just a year. Fred had been causing his brooding father concern for some time. In spite of everything, history seemed to be repeating itself. Although Fred had been treated as the eldest son should, the wretched boy seemed to show no gratitude. He was headstrong and wayward, both at home and at Cambridge. He had regained favour briefly when he won a prize for a Greek ode he had composed, but he seemed not to be applying himself and, to make matters worse, was running into debt. The crunch came when he was caught cutting chapel. He was set an imposition, but failed to do anything about it. To add insult to injury, he was impertinent when hauled before the college authorities to account for his behaviour and, as a result, rusticated for three terms.
The Rector was furious, not least because he had experienced similar problems with the college authorities when he was at Cambridge but had hoped for better things of Frederick after his successes at Eton. The worst of it was that, in spite of all his efforts to avert it, he was now locked in conflict with his eldest son, just as he had been with his own father.
Even Fred was a little shaken by his father’s fury. Elizabeth was petrified. She would hear her husband muttering in a drunken sleep that he would stab Frederick in the heart or in the jugular. She knew he was harbouring an ugly-looking knife and had a gun. Fred was promptly sent away to his aunt Fytche; Elizabeth took refuge with the other children in lodgings at Louth.
In 1829, the Revd. T.H. Rawnsley, incumbent of a neighbouring parish, came to the rescue by inviting Dr Tennyson to come and stay with his family for a while. There was a further respite when, in the middle of 1829, the Rector agreed that it would be a good idea for him to have another short break in Paris. A similar trip two years earlier had proved quite beneficial, enabling him to return in a calmer state of mind. Frederick’s rustication had shattered the temporary calm, but another foreign jaunt might just repair the damage.
For the six months or so before Alfred met Arthur, the Rector’s mental state cast a perpetual shadow. In lighter-hearted moments, Alfred would amuse his friends by his impersonations, a favourite being George IV. Even this carried the association of the name George with mental illness, but at least it was some comfort to reflect that even royals were not exempt.
But it was not just his father’s state that worried Alfred. His younger brothers were beginning to show alarming signs of depression and mental instability. He knew that he had a greater affinity with his father than any of his brothers. Did this mean that he was going to be more vulnerable than them?
Poetry was a wonderful solace. It took him into a different orbit from that of the family, with its health hazards, the constant brooding over cheated inheritance, the bickering and feuds. When it came to the crunch, it was to be this inner confidence in his poetic powers which enabled him to be the main support for the family during the ensuing years, but he himself was far from certain that this would be the case. On the contrary, he was secretly terrified by the trances and depressions which would suddenly overwhelm him without any warning. He had been told that he had suffered from severe convulsions when he was a baby. Was this a warning of what lay ahead? The whole business filled him with such foreboding that it was only much later in life, when he was finally convinced that his sanity was not at risk, that he was able to talk openly about it.
Even so, Thomas Carlisle, who was to become a great friend of his, when writing to Emerson in the 1840s, said of Tennyson that, although ‘one of the finest looking men in the world ... almost Indian-looking’, was yet
often unwell; very chaotic, - his way is thro’ Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon. ...
There had been many stresses and strains between early undergraduate days and the date of that letter, but here is testimony, from one who knew Alfred intimately, of the mental and emotional turmoil which dogged him during his twenties and thirties.
He came eventually to see the trances as giving him private access to a transcendental state. In later life, he recalled that, from childhood, he had been able to drift off into a waking trance simply by intoning his own name. It appears to have been a form of auto-hypnosis in which he eventually lost all sense of individuality, becoming absorbed in a very clear, weird, inexpressible, boundless state of being,
where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality ... seeming no extinction but the only true life.
From the vantage point of old age, these trances seemed to be characterised by an almost oriental serenity and poise; but the context of these reminiscences seems to belie this. Just before talking of the trances, he has said:
When I was about twenty, I used to feel moods of misery unutterable! I remember once in London the realisation coming over me, of the whole of the inhabitants lying horizontal a hundred years hence. The smallness & emptiness of life sometimes overwhelmed me .. the world seemed dead around and myself only alive.
[Talks and Walks (unpublished), at the Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln]He then tells of his trance experiences and adds:
It sometimes comes upon me after repeating my name to myself; through excess of realizing my own personality I seemed to get outside of myself.
More that anything else, the trances seem to have been his own desperate therapy to relieve a depressive state of ‘misery unutterable’. These depressions could strike at the most unexpected times, as at the dances he enjoyed during his Cambridge days, especially when he was home on vacation. This tall, dark, strikingly handsome young man was not only gaining status as a Poet but he could dance. He had many admirers, not least the young Sophy Rawnsley (daughter of the clerical neighbour) and, a year or two later, the beautiful Rosa Baring. Some of the girls he befriended found his short-sightedness daunting: he would scan them through his eye-glass and seem to look them through and through from head to toe. Most of them were prepared to tolerate this eccentricity for the joy of dancing with him.
But, as the ageing poet would recall,
.....sometimes in the midst of the dance, a great and sudden sadness would come over me, and I would leave the dance and wander away beneath the stars, or sit on gloomily and abstractedly below stairs. I used to wonder then, what strange demon it was, that drove me forth and took all the pleasure from my blood, and made me such a churlish curmudgeon.
[H.D. Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons, 1900, pp.67f.]What he did not say was that this ‘strange demon’ seemed unfairly fond of his family! And the trance states: were they entirely therapeutic or were they also sometimes more akin to an epileptic fit? The most telling pointer in this direction is the passage Alfred inserted, along with six section-dividing songs, in his 1850 revision of The Princess, which had been originally published three years earlier:
There lived an ancient legend in our
house.
There is another insertion towards the end [section VII] of the poem where the prince tells how all these untoward symptoms have been dispelled by gaining the hand of the lovely Princess Ida:
...lift thine eyes; my doubts are dead,
Alfred composed these lines whilst he was on his honeymoon! It looks suspiciously as if he is saying through his verse (a self-revealing habit of his to which he rarely admitted) that the old family demon which stalked his youth and early manhood and which he had recently come to feel had lost its power over him, was now finally laid to rest by his marriage.
At the time when Alfred first met Arthur, then, he was a young man from the country, totally unused to systematic study or the bookish sophistication of so many of the ex-public schoolboys around him. He was a stranger to formal debate or the kind of political, even theological, fireworks indulged in by striplings confident of future eminence. He was missing his family (in spite of all the turmoil) and missing the woods at Holywell, the lanes around Somersby, the wild sea at Mablethorpe. Frederick had been rusticated the previous October, so Charles was now his only link with all that. He was totally untravelled and aware that many of his utterances must sound woefully insular and uncouth to those who had seen so much more of the world, especially the better-heeled part of it
To add to the general sense of inferiority and ill-fittingness, there was growing anxiety about money. The allowance from his aunt Elizabeth was spent and debts were beginning to accumulate. Alfred knew how his father had reacted to the bills with which Frederick had presented him after he had been sent home. Charles was also in debt. This could only mean one thing. The Rector would have to go, cap in hand, to his father at Bayons - and both of them would hate it. It was a recipe for disaster, certain to aggravate his father’s already almost unbearable state of grievance, anger, illness and drug dependency.
Like most young men of his age at this time, Alfred was also feeling himself to be a dreadful sinner. No reasons are given, of course, but they are not hard to guess. Whereas Arthur was to find catharsis in his love for Ann Wintour, Alfred found it in Arthur. For him, as J.B. Steane observed:
the friendship of Arthur Hallam lightened a darkening existence as only a very rare affection could have done. One of the unpublished sonnets written during his time at Cambridge expresses his feeling of comfort amid the depression that would still assail him, he sees himself ‘all sin-sickened, loathing my disgrace’, able still to find ‘a shadow and a resting place in thee.’ [ Tennyson, p.3}
Apart from his pipe, to which he was devoted throughout his life, his great consolation was his poetry. The society he was now in, especially the ‘metaphysical set’ towards which he had gravitated, although he found it strange in many respects, valued and applauded poetic accomplishments far more highly than any society he had previously known. Whilst this bolstered his self-confidence, it did little to relieve his often crippling sense of desolation.
3
Arthur, at the time when he and Alfred first met, was also feeling intensely lonely, but for almost entirely different reasons. His loneliness could almost be said to have been planned by his father.
Henry Hallam was a distinguished historian with Whig sympathies. His Constitutional History was published in 1827, during Arthur’s last year at Eton. We are told that, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert returned to Buckingham Palace from their Windsor honeymoon in 1840, this is the book they were reading together and finding absorbing.
[Elizabeth Longford’s Victoria R.I., World Books Edition, 1969, p. 179.]Henry had married Julia Elton of Clevedon Court near Bristol and had himself inherited a good deal of money and property. He was popular in aristocratic Whig circles throughout the country, though less so with the bright younger set. People like Henry Fox felt he talked down to them and were not slow to retaliate.
Like the Rector of Somersby, Henry Hallam had fathered eleven children but, as with the Rector, nature’s prodigality had proved tragically flawed. For the Hallams, the hereditary problem seems to have been a physical malformation of the brain which resulted, not in mental illness, but in premature death. By 1829, when Arthur first befriended Alfred, seven of the original eleven children were already dead; by the time Henry himself died, thirty years later, he had only one daughter to survive him.
This dreadful rate of mortality put Arthur under something of a spotlight. His health was not robust but he did seem to be a survivor. He was also, in his father’s shrewd estimation, the brightest of his sons. Henry did everything in his power to develop the boy’s intellectual gifts. By the time he was seven, Henry had him reading French. Two years later, Arthur had broken the back of Latin. He also showed promise of more creative capacity, writing ‘tragedies’ which astonished his parents by their brilliance, Henry was not altogether happy about this. Although he had a grudging respect for literary merit, he could never put the writing of fiction on the same high pedestal as sound scholarship. Partly for this reason, and partly to prevent Arthur from being spoiled by fatuous praise, he kept Arthur’s literary prowess a secret.
When Arthur left Eton in 1827, at the age of sixteen, he was regarded as the outstanding scholar of his year. The work habits he had acquired at home under his father’s tutelage had, in fact, endowed him with a primness easily mistaken for priggishness, earning him the school nick-name of ‘Mother Hallam’. But Arthur was sufficiently popular and sociable to be able to live down this side of his persona. Aside from his formidable scholarly and debating skills (for he was currently intensely interested in politics and oratory), Arthur had a great need for friends and a matching gift for friendship.
During Eton days, he saw more of Gladstone than any of his other friends. ‘Weg’ (as his initials ordained he should be nick-named) was two years senior to Arthur - interestingly, just four months younger that Alfred - but he rapidly became convinced that his friend was his intellectual superior. His eventual verdict on their friendship was:
so unequal, as between his mental powers and mine, that I have questioned myself strictly whether I was warranted in supposing it to have been knit with such closeness as I have fondly supposed.
This may have been an over-modest assessment but it is admirable in its objectivity and honesty. Gladstone’s feeling of inferiority was reinforced by the social gap he felt between them. Arthur came from a cultured, landed, southern, scholarly background, whilst he was the son of a Liverpool merchant. He became desperately anxious to bridge this gap because, the better he got to know him, the more he thirsted for his affection, even his love.
On September 24, 1826, he confided to his diary his great regard for the younger boy:
I esteem as well as admire him. Perhaps I am declaring too explicitly & too positively for the period of our intimacy [sic] - which has not yet lasted a year - but such is my present feeling.
Three years later, another diary entry analyses their relationship to that point with extraordinary care:
It began late in 1824, more at his seeking than
mine.
One of the things that made friendship with Arthur so rewarding was that it lifted life out of the mundane rut. As Gladstone put it, Arthur, even as a schoolboy, ‘glorified by a touch of the ideal’ everything he had to do with - including his friendships.
When Arthur was off colour at Eton, Weg would scull him upstream to the Shallows, where they could talk idly and affectionately together. Arthur wrote to his sister Ellen from Eton in April 1826,
You don’t know the delight of sculling up to the shallows, or Boveney & floating down, lying at the bottom of the boat, the sun shining full in your face, & the birds chirping all round.
He did not tell his sister that it was Weg who was doing the work!
At other times, the two of them were earnestly putting the world right, even in the holidays. Here is a random extract from a letter Arthur wrote to Gladstone from Sutton (or Epsom) in September, 1827:
What is the House of Commons? Let Burke answer for me: "A controll
[sic] for the people to be resolved into the mass of that people when its functions are performed." Are the Commons an adequate representation of the people? Let facts answer for me: The American war, at first eagerly entered .. was ... loathed and detested by the p[eople] yet the voice of the Commons of England could not ..... prevail . for nearly 3 years. It is a corollary therefore, that during the present constitution of the House, the most dreadful miseries, even a civil war, even the immense loss of millions of our fellow-creatures, & oppressive burdens of the country, cannot be averted, even though the People cry night & day for relief ......-and so it goes on, at considerable length and in carefully phrased detail, in letter after letter from each to each.
When Arthur left Eton, his centre of interest began almost immediately to shift from politics to poetry and literature. The shift is well documented in his letters. In September 1826, he wrote from Eton to William Windham Farr - the old school friend who was probably the one Weg feared had usurped his place for a time:
To plague you with politics is a very cruel thing in me, ... but what can a poor bewildered devil like me talk about else?
Six months later, again writing to Farr, he says:
our friend Gladstone ... will be re-elected Chairman [of the Eton Society]; Prime Minister of England not quite so certain.
Arthur was already exercising his talent for forecasting futures, although in Gladstone’s case he was more tentative than he invariably was about Alfred.
It is interesting that Arthur has become more positive about Gladstone by the time he writes to their mutual friend, James Gaskell on 6 March, 1828. It seems that Gaskell has told Arthur that Weg regards his friend as a ‘bud of great promise’. Arthur modestly shrugs aside the compliment but says,
Whatever may be our lot, I am confident he is a bud that will bloom with a richer fragrance than almost any whose early promise I have witnessed.
By the year of his death, however, he could write, in April, 1833, to his ex-Cambridge friend, Richard Chevenix Trench:
Politics I am so tired of and hopeless of, that I wish to write or think little about them.
The transition has been total. A factor may well have been a growing sense that his life was being steered too much by an over-active parent. His years away from home had given him the first real opportunity to discover where his own true interests lay. He had written to his father from Eton when he was only fourteen to tell him that he had just bought ‘a Byron’s works in a beautiful green binding.’ As he wrote these words, he probably had a feeling that this was not the kind of news his father was keenest to hear. When his father sent him to Cambridge rather than to his own old college (Christ Church, Oxford), and when it dawned on him why he had done this, he must have realised that he was going to need to resist parental pressure if he wanted a life he could call his own.
Between Eton and Cambridge, Arthur had enjoyed nine months travelling in Italy. He wrote to Weg from Genoa in September, 1827:
He spoke true, who said - "Travelling - constant travelling is the only way to prolong life"
As things turned out, he could hardly have chosen a more tragically ironic quotation. However, he was already a seasoned traveller. But he had been only seven and eleven on his two previous trips abroad and he had always been with his family. Now, for the first time, he was largely free to do his own thing and already, almost as soon as he had left Eton, the shift in his centre of interest was beginning to affect his friendship with Gladstone. Before he left England, on 13 August, 1827, he had written to contest one of Weg’s political opinions:
And here, my dear Gladstone, I must say I do not like that part of your letter. I do not like the tone of it..
Although he softens this by adding that he has written more in sorrow than anger since there is nobody whose opinions he normally values more highly, we can judge how offended Gladstone has been by Arthur’s next letter, from Florence on 30 October, 1827:
If there was anything in those foolish letters of mine before I left England, that could cause you pain for a moment, I am deeply sorry for it. I thank you for having borne with me, as you have. I am very sensible, that I have not profited from your friendship as much as was reasonably to be expected from the excellence of your character...
He goes on to express the hope that, should they become intimate again ‘as we have been intimate’, he will prove a worthier friend. Gladstone would not fail to notice the dominance of the past tense in that letter.
In mid-December, 1827, Arthur writes to tell Gladstone of his delight, his ‘inexpressible feeling’, at meeting up in Rome with his old friend, James Milnes Gaskell, ‘with whom I had been intimate at Eton.’
He rather contradicts this in his next letter to Gladstone, again from Rome, in early January, 1828:
you will remember that at Eton we were neither of us
This is certainly ‘Mother Hallam’ speaking. Arthur is obviously anxious to imply that his own father has far more sense than to do anything like this. Even so, he must have had an uncomfortable suspicion that his father had, in spite of appearances, set his heart on Arthur’s being a prodigy. It is almost as if his father is looking over his shoulder when he concludes the letter by telling Weg how diligently he has been working at his Italian:
I can now speak it with tolerable facility. Gaskell is lazy about that, and other things; retaining his old hatred of exercise, and adding to it an almost equal aversion to sightseeing.
As well as getting to grips with the language, Arthur had also been translating Dante’s Vita Nuova. His father would certainly have approved this industrious application of scholarship, yet, ironically, this exercise was to exert an influence on Arthur which Henry would find deeply disturbing.
The more Arthur immersed himself in Dante, the more his imagination was captured by the medieval Christian ideal. In his Introduction to Arthur's translations of Dante, T.H.Vail Motter observed that, in this work:
the loved one is the means of God’s grace, and ... sexual love exerts an ennobling spiritual power upon the lover. This ...became fused in Hallam’s thinking with the Platonic ideas of love and friendship. [The Writings of Arthur Hallam, pp.116f.]
This fusion of ideas became the central motif of nearly everything he published when he got to Cambridge.
It also spilled out into his life. His preoccupation with Dante’s Beatrice considerably coloured his feeling for Anna Mildred Wintour. She was a friend of Anne Robertson and she in turn was the sister of Robert, an ex-Eton friend with whom Arthur spent part of his time in Italy. Arthur wrote poems about both these ladies, but it was Anna who had stolen his heart. He felt from the start that his love was doomed because Anna was ten years his senior and he knew it would be very difficult for him to even see her again once they had left Italy. But for Arthur this love was cathartic, helping to cleanse the memory of some of the sexual scenes he had doubtless witnessed or participated in at school.
Evidence of this can be found in the poem, A Meeting and a Farewell, which Arthur wrote the following year and dedicated to his friend, Gaskell. He tells his friend:
In sooth I envy thee: thou seemest
pure;
The year before this, just after his return from Italy, Arthur had written A Farewell to the South - which might as aptly have been titled ‘A farewell to Anna’ - in which the woman is depicted, like Dante’s Donna Angelicata, as cleanser of the polluted male breast:
......... Woman’s love was sent
The curious thing is that Gaskell had fallen in love with Anna quite as heavily as Arthur - and this had led to a more intimate bond between the two male lovers than either of them managed to achieve with their beloved Anna. A Meeting and a Farewell had included these lines:
There is another world; .....
There is a possibly intentional ambivalence about ‘and love once more together!’ Does Arthur mean that he and Gaskell will be united eternally by their shared love for Anna? Or is it their love for each other that is uppermost in his mind?
On 14 April, 1828, Arthur is writing to Gaskell from Naples to say that, although only six months earlier he would have thought his friend the last person on earth to be susceptible to Cupid’s wiles, he now has to concede that he would have been gravely misjudging his friend. All the same, he is a little worried by the intensity of feeling expressed by the poem (inspired by Anna) which Gaskell had enclosed with his previous letter. He advises Gaskell that he would be wise ‘to moderate a little the vehemence of that adoration’ in view of the fact that he and Anna will soon be parted, probably for ever. The great consolation is that they have each other:
For Gaskell, I am firm in hope that, however superficial our intimacy at Eton may have been, we are now real friends for ever.
Two months later, as soon as he is back in England, he dashes off another letter to Gaskell from Dover:
I have been in almost continual vexation of spirit, my dearest Gaskell, since I lost your society, and with it the beautiful land which I have some right to hail as the country of my heart. No longer possessing a friend who could share what I feel, in whose affections I could find a faithful echo to my hopes, my fears, my regrets, and my enjoyments, I was driven back upon myself.
He takes refuge in the Platonic idea, as expressed by Landor, that ‘absence is the invisible, incorporeal mother of ideal beauty’, a thought which, if Arthur later shared it with Alfred, may well have helped, after Arthur’s death, to buttress Alfred against his grief and to shape the form in which he voiced it.
On 3 July, 1828, whilst on holiday with his family in Ramsgate, he writes to Gladstone:
It is my destiny, it would seem, in this world to form no friendship, which when I begin to appreciate it, & hold it dear, is not torn from me by the hand of circumstance.
Arthur must be aware by now that the circumstance in question is his father’s uneasiness about the intensity of his Eton-based friendships and the disruptive effect these are likely to have on his son’s singleness of purpose; it is for this reason that he has decided to send Arthur to Cambridge rather that to his own old college. The letter to Gladstone continues:
The friends whom I loved at Eton I shall not see at Cambridge. Those who endeared to me my sojourn in Italy are scattered to the four winds of heaven.
The bitter pill for Gladstone was that he could not include himself in the latter group, whereas Gaskell (who was also going to Oxford) belonged to both. Even bitterer must have been the last part of the letter:
As for politics, I have taken a disgust to them of late; and plead not guilty to the charge of having corrupted Gaskell, with whom I have scarcely ever talked on such subjects.
Arthur has not even started his undergraduate career but has already ‘taken a disgust’ to politics. This turnabout will have been at least partly a covert revolt against his father’s attempt to divert the course of his life, but Gladstone must have found it puzzling and fickle. He upbraided Arthur in his next letter and, when Arthur replies a month later (again from Ramsgate), he pleads innocence:
As for Italy, I was perfectly aware that whatever was the state of my own feelings, very few from obvious causes could be expected to enter into them; and I therefore confined what I said within narrow bounds, adverting principally to the sorrow I felt on account of my almost total separation from my own friends, both those in whose friendship I had at Eton taken such pride, & pleasure, and those who endeared to me my year’s sojourn in Italy. I was not aware that even this little would prove too much, or I certainly would not have touched on the subject.
Arrived at Trinity, Arthur writes again to Gladstone on 8 November, informing him that he has bumped into a number of former Eton friends after all, principally Frere, but also Pickering (‘remarkably improved. I like him now as much as I disliked him formerly..’) and Hamilton. On the other hand, Arthur feels that Farr, formerly a closer friend than the others, has deteriorated, spending his time mainly with a set of
drinking High Tories. ... That he cannot really like the men with whom he associates, I by no means wonder; and it is therefore natural that he should cling to me.
[But Arthur will have none of it] .. I can never be a friend of his. I am afraid I have been rather difficult on that score lately; Meanwhile I envy you Gaskell with all my heart and soul. I trust your friendship will be a benefit to him; and that in the full of its enjoyment he will never forget one, who in his sphere will have to look long before he can find another heart so affectionate, another mind so harmonious, whereon to trust in confidential reliance.Arthur must have felt that fate had played a cruel trick on him and Gladstone must have been struck by the irony of the situation. In 1826, he had written in his diary that Farr (not named, but almost certainly the boy concerned) had, for a while, taken his place in Arthur’s affections. A little over two years later, Farr, now with Arthur at Cambridge, has entirely fallen from grace, while Gaskell, now with Weg at Oxford, seems to have replaced Farr as his chief rival!
The extent to which Gaskell has now become Arthur’s closest friend may be judged from the letter Arthur wrote to him from Trinity on 2 February, 1829:
Carissimo, I have thrown open to you my whole heart; you know all my weakness as well as all my aspirations towards good! may I never be brought to think that I have made the experiment in vain. For an experiment it surely is: it is said in the cold world that no good comes of opening one’s inmost self to the view even of him whom we have deemed our friend; that where all is known nothing is imagined, and hence mutual discontent and exhaustion - "And thereof comes in the end despondency and madness!" I will prove these liars ....
Here is an early example of Arthur’s ambivalence: a longing for utter intimacy on the one hand; a great fear of exposure on the other. Later in this letter Arthur tells Gaskell that a ring Anna had given him, and which he had treasured, has been taken from his room during the night. He had presumably confided in somebody he thought quite trustworthy about the ring and its significance, straight from the finger of his belovèd. If this is so, he was naturally feeling betrayed and shaken when it disappeared.
A most interesting letter from Arthur to Gaskell, written from Malvern in the following September, shows the extent of their mutual trust:
But to return to that story which causes you so much indignation, it lies heavy on me too, and will perhaps lie heavier. There are certain circumstances connecting that man
[a certain ‘Florentine druggist’ who has apparently become engaged to Anna] and myself in a way that will render it the last thing possible for me ever to see him. I speak this to you alone; and I entreat you earnestly never to say this of me to any living soul. More than this I cannot say even to you. There are some things which, were it possible, one would never tell oneself. Remember, I do not say he may not make a good husband in the ordinary acceptation of the world; the impediment I spoke of exists merely with relation to myself; of his character I know little or nothing, though certainly my impression of the man is not that I had desired to receive from the chosen partner of the woman I had loved.Behind the guardedness of this confession it is not difficult to construe a homosexual incident occurring between Arthur and the ‘Florentine druggist’. Everything points in this direction. Arthur feels ashamed (‘things, were it possible, one would never tell oneself’) and frightened (‘I speak this to you alone... never.. say this of me to any living soul’). But here is another irony: the man to whom Anna is now engaged and the intimate friend to whom he is writing, who has also been passionately in love with Anna, are both men with whom he has himself been intimately involved.
If this seems strange, one only has to read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature & Male Homosocial Desire to be reminded that this is a recurring theme in English novels, especially during this period. Sedgwick’s term, homosocial, is more inclusive than the word, homosexual, since it embraces all shades of male bonding, whether or not they include an overtly sexual element. She builds on the work of René Girard to show that a triangular relationship involving two males and a woman may result in the two males becoming more intimate with each other, at least for a time, than either is with the woman. This mechanism has already been evident between Arthur and Gaskell in their common pursuit of Anna. Now it emerges, at a rather different level, between Arthur and the ‘Florentine druggist’ in their common pursuit of Anna.
The more one thinks about this phenomenon, the less strange it becomes. When one recalls the social taboos and inherited neuroses which tended to suppress any manifestation of homosexual desire between males in nineteenth century England, it is hardly surprising that a shared involvement with a woman could offer a convenient chink in their armour. They could confide in each other their shared love without seeming to infringe the homosexual taboo. Yet, in the very process of declaring the ‘normality’ of their sexuality to each other, they were themselves drawing closer to each other emotionally than either would otherwise have dreamed possible or even desirable. The mere fact of sharing a sexually based passion would seem to indicate a sexual kinship between them which could easily begin to challenge the homosexual taboo.
Interestingly, Arthur has something to say about this phenomenon when he is writing to his fiancée two year later (on 1 October, 1831):
Milnes Gaskell is an old companion of mine, and his amiability, frankness, and courtesy make his society always agreeable to me. In tastes we are very different ... However, we have common topics .. and old recollections supply any little deficiency in the actual intercourse of our minds. I knew him first at Eton, and was much with him, being as fond of politics then myself, ... Afterwards we met in Italy, and circumstances then threw us together still more closely. You know, I believe, that I was attached to an English lady residing in that country, but perhaps I never told you that he was equally so - and the odd part of the story is that we never quarrelled, but liked each other all the better for loving the same person! ... it was not love I felt ... it would have become love but the nature of the case excluded all hope ...
[though the] latent powers of reflection and enthusiasm [evoked by his feeling for Anna] were very extensive, and such as I shall feel ... all my life. Are you jealous ..? You need not fear; I could see that face again, that beautiful face, without one disloyal thought to my Emily.A postscript to the friendship with Gaskell is that when Francis Henry Doyle, another of Arthur’s Eton friends, eventually married Gaskell’s sister, their son was named ‘Arthur’ in memory of Hallam.
Arthur had many reservations about the academic side of life at Cambridge, some of them before he even arrived there. Whilst still at Ramsgate, on 3 July, 1830, he wrote to Gladstone:
I have no aversion to study; I trust, quite the contrary; though my ideals of the essential do not precisely square with those of the worshipful Dons of Cambridge.
In the second verse of a poem simply called ‘Lines’, Arthur finds himself
Half in a craving want,
After completing his first term, he writes from Brighton on 20 December 1828, to Robert Robertson (whose sister had been the intermediary between himself and Anna and with whom he had spent part of the Italian trip). He complains that he has ‘never taken the least interest in mathematical science’. He has no quarrel at all with Greek language or literature, nor with the tastes of those undergraduates he has befriended, but, at the end of the day
it is a hot atmosphere I am breathing. I dislike ... the interchange of opinions I have described. I long for repose - I long for leisure to exert my mind in calmness, not under this universal pressure. I long in short for Italy...
Things seem to get steadily worse. In March, 1829, he penned Lines Written in Great Depression of Mind. The first three verses end with the line, ‘Yet would I die!’ and the last with ‘Oh let me die!’
It was just a few days after writing this poem that Arthur first met Alfred and felt an immediate rapport with him. The whole situation is rapidly transformed. In May, he was nominated for membership of ‘The Apostles’ [The Cambridge Conversazione Society], a rather secretive group of approximately a dozen students who regarded themselves - and were often regarded by others - as an intellectual elite, especially on the artistic or ‘metaphysical’ side of the academic fence.
In June, Alfred won the Chancellors’s Gold Medal for his version of ‘Timbuctoo’. He was too nervous to read the poem himself at the Senate House, so he asked Charles Merivale, the previous year’s medallist, to read it for him. The reason he gave his father for this failure of nerve was ‘a determination of blood to the Head’ which had impaired his eyesight and compelled him to consult an oculist. Arthur could not be there because he was in France, then Scotland, with his father, trying to shake off an illness which still dogged him on his return.
On 6 July, 1829, whilst still in Edinburgh, Arthur again writes to Robert Robinson:
You have probably heard that I have been ill lately with a complaint in the head; but you cannot have heard and can have no adequate idea of the miseries I suffered in mind, before that complaint came on: the most abject despondency mixed with vague dread and strong remorse. Oh, my God! I hope never to know such days as those again. Since my illness I am much better. I see my way out of my glooms when they come upon me, and I despair less of ultimate peace of mind. Cambridge I hate intensely; which however is no reason why you should not like it.
Robertson seems to have been the chief recipient of Arthur’s outbursts against university life, which friendship with Alfred has moderated but not removed. He writes to him again in mid-December, 1829:
... indeed any pursuit requiring calmness and ease of mind along with diligence, I would rather undertake in any part of the globe that at Cambridge. ... This odious place has been less odious to me this term than before, yet I fear I have purchased my increase of
pleasurable excitement by a diminution of thoughtful habits, and energies.Two years later, some months after Alfred has had to leave Cambridge, Robertson receives the following letter from Hastings, dated 25 August, 1831:
Whenever I get out of the atmosphere of Cambridge, I seem to breathe freely; the use of my natural faculties returns to me; I can read, and I can think; it makes all the difference between fool and no fool. I am glad therefore, that my Academical time draws to a close.
The following Spring, after returning to Trinity from a visit to Somersby, a letter to Alfred informs him that ‘Cambridge is especially loathsome to me.’ Part of the problem is obviously the conflict caused by his father’s desire that he should concentrate on his studies - and the less ‘metaphysical’ the better. A part of him was quite happy to comply with this desire but another part of him, more spontaneous, more intuitive, longed for love and for deep communion with others. As we shall see, he was often reduced to utter despair in trying to resolve this conflict.
A revealing letter to Gladstone, written from Malvern on 14 September, 1829, shows how accurately he has diagnosed his own problem:
I feel as if I had lived awfully fast - in everything been premature - run round, as it were, the whole circle of this life’s opinions, & sensations, before my nineteenth summer has past over me. Academical honours would be less than nothing to me, were it nor for my father’s wishes....
4
When Arthur and Alfred first meet, therefore, there is eighteen months’ difference in age between them and a whole world of social, cultural, educational and temperamental separateness.
But Arthur has abandoned politics, his first love, and become a devotee of Dante, poetry now constituting for him the very essence of life. Although he has had the advantage of an Eton education, Arthur has no taste at all for mathematics and is finding all things ‘Academical’ largely irrelevant to his main interests; there is a coldness about most of the academics around him which offends the warmth of his nature. In spite of his father’s eminence as a scholar and his great solicitude for his son, Arthur is in rebellion against parental control.
In spite of his privileged social background, Arthur is acutely aware that his family is physically jinxed; since schooldays he has often been ill himself; more recently he has suffered an almost unbearable pressure in his head, alternating with a depression so deep that he has feared for his sanity and even longed for death. He has fallen in love with Anna, but known, almost from the outset, that this love was doomed; he has known a very satisfying intimacy with Gladstone and Gaskell but his father has effectively put a stop to all that. On top of all his other worries, therefore, he feels he exists in a chilling emotional vacuum and is beset by a numbing sense of loneliness and futility.
Alfred, probably because his background was so much less sophisticated, was much less self-aware than Arthur. Yet, as we have seen, at every point he shared very similar worries. He too felt that he was constitutionally incapable of maths; he deplored the coldness and lovelessness of formal academic life. Montagu Butler recalled how, at the end of 1886, when he had just been installed as the new Master of Trinity, he visited Alfred, now an old man, at Farringford. The conversation turned to the sonnet about Cambridge which Alfred had written sixty years earlier and which had ended, ‘..you that do profess to teach / And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.’ Alfred had turned to the newly-appointed Master and said, ‘There was no love in the system.’
Alfred also had problems with his father, not because the Rector wanted to impose his own ambitions on him, but because of the unpredictable moods and fits of depression or blind, drunken anger which had sometimes made the boy pray for death. He was also haunted by the ‘bad blood’ which seemed to pursue his family and which probably underlay his own depressions and strange waking trances. He must have told Arthur about all this because, as early as September, 1829, just after he had paid his first visit to an asylum, Arthur composed Lines Addressed to Alfred Tennyson, which included:
Within the mansion of the mad
More recently, Alfred’s health worries had been compounded by a rushing of blood to his head (almost exactly what Arthur complained of!), which seemed to threaten his eyesight.
In one respect, he was behind Arthur: he had not yet experienced an intense emotional or physical relationship with anybody, male or female, outside the ties that bound him to his brothers and sisters. In spite of this, Alfred was experiencing a depth of loneliness and emotional need which, because more pent up, was probably more passionate than anything Arthur had experienced. When it finally dawned on him that this need had now been filled beyond anything he had dared hope for, he never ceased to be amazed.
The impact of Alfred upon Arthur may be gauged from the poems Arthur was writing during September and October, 1829. In Wordsworth at Glenarbach: An Episode, there was a line which Henry Hallam insisted on removing before he would finally allow the poem to be published: it said of Alfred, ‘he of all men nearest to my soul.’ The poem goes on:
... I would be
That Alfred is a ‘master’, Arthur never for a moment doubted. In Lines in Answer to a Desponding Letter (a letter he has received from his Cambridge friend, R.J. Tennant), Arthur writes:
... thou art a man,