SD1797. Frederick Tennyson to Alfred Tennyson & Emily Tennyson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 370 (in part).
Florence
Dec. 30th, 1854.
My Dear E. and A.
I have been owing you a letter for ages, and since Yule is come round I must not see it go by without making enquiries after the fortunes of yourselves and kith. Bulwer’s son, who left Florence for Paris where he is now an unhappy attaché to the Legation will shortly appear before the public in bardlike robes. He is not more than two and twenty I believe but a young man of great promise and remarkable moreover for his amiable temper. Besides which as I have latterly been letting a moiety of the Villa Torrigiani finding it larger than we require and inconveniently expensive, I have hooked a couple of tenants who are Poets, one a young Norton son of the literary lady and cosmical celebrity of that name, who has married a peasant girl of Capri who not a year ago was scampering barefooted and bareheaded over the rocks and shingles of that island. Norton has turned Roman Catholic among other accomplishments being in search he said of a “Graceful Faith.” Why not then have turned Pagan at once, everything in the old days of grace being vastly more in good taste. He is punctual and exact in his orisons, considers (God save the mark!) the Italian people to be the people of God! Russia in the right, Protestantism on its last legs, etc.! When his mother was a grander lady and a greater beauty than she will ever be again, poor thing; it appears that her son used to find his way in her wake into the penetralia of Palaces, and witnessed the high jinkses of the high-nosed. The recollection of these gay days when he was a mere boy has turned in his mind to a kind of Byronian despair and he fancies he has drunk the cup of life to the lees, and it is infinitely amusing to hear him though not more than two and twenty talking in this manner. “In my young days when I used to eat off gold plate.” “Well you’re rather a fine old fellow considering” is his comment on my lamentations. Such are the aberrations of Brinsley Norton the great grandson of Sheridan. Though his brain on many important subjects is a mere muddle he has a strong vein of poetry in him. With all his faults and eccentricities, he is really amiable and perfectly a gentleman. I now come to my other tenant, a Miss Blagden, a little gem of an old maid, a chirpy Pythoness, who writes very decent Poesies, which must yield the palm however to her goodfellowship. She is the pink of the sociable, and what is better she has taken under her protection a poor deformed girl whom she tends with maternal care who never moves from her couch yet seems to enjoy excellent health and spirits, and has a great sense of the humorous if one may judge from the hearty shireks of laughter with which she welcomes anything that tickles her fancy. We meet together about three times a week and have music with the piano and harmonium which go exceedingly well together, the latter taking the violin and violoncello parts with effect. Browning comes in occasionally, but poor Mrs B. never stirs out during the winter. Under the rose, they are both preparing new poems, Browning a batch of Lyrics which are to be the real thing, Mrs B. a kind of Metrical Romance. Though I have the highest esteem for Browning, and believe him to be a man of infinite learning, jest and bonhomie, and moreover a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness, I verily believe his school of poetry to be the worst conceivable. With the exception of the “Blot on the Scutcheon,” through which you may possibly grope your way without the aid of an Ariadne, the rest appear to me to be Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities, I don’t expect that he will ever write anything readable. Yet he has a very Catholic taste in poetry, doing justice to everything good in all Poets past or present and one who has a profound admiration of Alfred. I hear from Palgrave that A. has a new poem on the stocks; a few of the best stanzas in your next letter I should prize highly, and the Brownings would be delighted to see a specimen of it. I suppose the poem on the “Charge of the Six Hundred” in the Examiner, signed A. T. is really by Alfred. Browning sent me the paper but I could give him no information on the subject. … I forget if you know Mrs Sartoris late Adelaide Kemble, she was here during the latter part of the summer. I had not seen her for twenty years, she is grown colossal, but all her folds of fat have not smothered her voice or extinguished the love of music in her. She delighted us all by her singing, her voice may not be of the first order, but her management of it certainly is, and there are few who understand Weber, Handel, Mozart, etc., so well as she does. Moreover she is really a good soul I think, and if she acts it is the humorous and pleasant parts, while her sister Fanny is like a lioness seeking whom she may devour. …
Text: Hallam Tennyson, Materials for a Life of A.T. (London, 1895), 2, 286–289.
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