'A Flute of Arcady': Autograph Poems of Tennyson's Friend, Arthur Henry Hallam
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'A FLUTE OF ARCADY': AUTOGRAPH POEMS OF TENNYSON'S FRIEND, ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM ROGER EVANS And all we met was fair and good, And all was good that Time could bring. And all the secret of the Spring Moved in the chambers of the blood: And many an old philosophy On Argive heights divinely sang. And round us all the thicket rang To many a flute of Arcady. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., Section 23 ALTHOUGH Arthur Henry Hallam (fig. i) is granted a column and a half in the pages of the Dictionary of National Biography, he remains a tenuous shade in the national memory. He achieved no conventional academic distinction or position of political or social prominence, he left little that may be called ground-breaking and he fathered no progeny, worthy or otherwise. This said, his early death at the age of twenty-two so profoundly shook the greatest poet of the Victorian age, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and its greatest prime minister, W. E. Gladstone, he was a living presence in their memory to the end of their long lives. More importantly for us, he is a presence in the canon of English literature to be equated with Lycidas and Adonais, for he was the subject of one of the most sustainedly moving elegies in our language, Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. In March 1998 the British Library acquired one of Hallam's notebooks, the most extensive collection of his poetry in his hand to survive and by far the most personal.^ It is a slim volume of some seventy folios, bound in now fragile calf boards, much of the spine gone but with the stitching intact and showing no evidence of having lost any folios except for one which is a mere stub. There are no blank leaves in the volume. It measures 160 X 100 X II mm. After Hallam's death in 1833 it was passed to his sister, Juha, who in 1852 married Captain John Cator, later Lennard. It then passed to their son and by descent to the present members of the family from whom it was acquired by the British Library. After 22 December 1931 it was kept in an envelope (once containing a Christmas card.^) addressed to Beatrice, Lady Lennard and the envelope remained with it when it was acquired. 212 ' h: Fig. I. A pencil study of Arthur Henry Hallam by his friend James Spedding, c. 1832. The actress Fanny Kemble said 'There was a gentleness and purity almost virginal in his voice, manner and countenance.' From a photograph in the possession of the Tennyson Research Centre. By permission of Lincolnshire Gounty Council 213 The volume contains in autograph forty-seven of Hallam's own poems and transcriptions in his hand of three other poems, one by Alfred Tennyson, one by Frederick Tennyson^ and one by Richard Chenevix Trench.^ On the inside front board is Hallam's signature and the date May 1830. The first two poems, which are by him, are similarly dated May 1830 and then a series of poems dated chronologically to December 1830 ends abruptly with one dated November 1830, followed by a series serially postdated back to March 1830. This, of course, indicates that he did not write out all the poems in fair copy at the moment of composition. There are similar movements in time throughout the rest of the volume. The earliest date appended to a poem is March 1830, two months before the volume was begun, and the last dated poem has July 1831 given to it. Two of his poems are undated as are the three by other authors. One of his undated poems was probably written in July 1831, the other not much earlier, certainly not later. We can therefore say that the manuscript is dated May 1830 to circa July r83i, that is, when Hallam was aged between nineteen and twenty. He was born in Bedford Place, near the British Museum, on i February 1811, the son of Henry Hallam, the distinguished historian. Educated at Eton, where he was considered their leading poet, he was befriended by his fellow scholar W. E. Gladstone and before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1828, he spent nine months in Italy. There he quickly acquired a fluent grasp of the Italian language and steeped himself in the works of Dante and Petrarch. Already remarkably versed in the literature of his own country, he was quick to seize a copy of Shelley's Adonais (then unknown in England) first published in Pisa^ and introduced it to his Cambridge friends when he arrived. He was one of those involved in the first English edition, published in Cambridge in 1829, and contributed an unsigned textual note in it. There is a symmetry, one of those often thrown up so strangely by history, in this action and in the consequences of his Cambridge career. He entered Cambridge feeling that his destiny was that of a poet; at the end of his first academic year he was able to write to his friend Richard Monckton Milnes: 'My poetical faculty has developed itself marvellously: it burns now in my heart: God grant me if I am to have a Poet's destiny, at least a Poet's power. '^ That he lacked the 'Poet's power' was a reality partly brought in upon him by his contact with Alfred Tennyson who had entered Trinity in 1827 and was a fellow competitor for the Chancellor's Gold Medal for English verse in March 1829. Tennyson won both the medal and Hallam's friendship. A skilful orator, Hallam found his metier in the University Debating Society and in the Cambridge Conversazione Society, a highly articulate gathering of undergraduates who, because of their number, called themselves the 'Apostles'. Tennyson was elected a member on 24 January 1830 but remained one only briefly. The month before, Hallam had made his first visit to Tennyson's home, the rectory at Somersby in Lincolnshire and had met other members of his large family, including Tennyson's sister Emily. He was there again in April 1830 working with Tennyson on what they hoped would be a jointly- produced volume of poems: in the event, however, Hallam's father, who particularly disliked the personal nature of many of his son's poems, forbade the publication and 214 Hallam merely released his share of the work in a privately printed collection of extremely limited circulation in May.** Tennyson released his share in what was his first major volume. Poems, Ghiefly Lyrical, in June. It was during his April visit to Somersby that Hallam fell in love with Emily. In July both he and Tennyson, with more zeal than prudence, set off for Spain to give support to insurrectionists and were back in England in September. By Christmas Tennyson's father was mortally ill and in February 1831 Tennyson left Cambridge for good, never taking his degree, to be by his father's bedside. The Rector died on 16 March 1831. At this point Hallam ventured to offer his hand in marriage to Emily but Henry Hallam curtailed such notions, prohibiting his son from visiting Somersby again until he reached his majority. Nevertheless the lovers continued a lengthy correspondence. In July Hallam himself abandoned the notion of being a poet and turned to philosophy and in the following month his review of Tennyson's poems was published in The Englishman's Magazine.'^ He left Cambridge in January 1832 and became formally engaged to Emily in March, by which time he was twenty-one. That Spring he became a member of the Inner Temple and on 15 September 1833, whrle in Vienna with his father, he suddenly died of a ruptured aneurism in the brain. This necessarily selective outline of his brief life highlights, I hope, the significance of the months covered by the Hallam notebook. We can see that the friends' relationship had become thoroughly established by May 1830 when the notebook was begun. What must be stressed in considering this relationship is the profound effect Hallam had on Tennyson's work. He was then not so much a muse as an agent who, convinced of the monumental promise of his friend's poetry, stinted not at all in spreading his fame. Tennyson was at that time desultory in his attempts to publish; a considerable body of his verse was circulated in manuscript among friends but he was hesitant, even indifferent, when faced with the idea of publication. Hallam it was who took action on his friend's behalf and this was what Tennyson needed. Milnes later recalled that Hallam was not merely a beloved friend, a delightful companion but 'a most wise and influential counsellor in all the serious concerns of existence... an incomparable critic in all our literary efforts'.^ While at Somersby in April 1830, Hallam was moved to declare: 'If I die I hope to be buried here: for never in my life, I think, have I loved a place more... I have floated along a delicious dream of music and poetry and riding and dancing and greenwood dinners and ladies' conversation.'^ He was, of course, in love. Two series of sonnets relating to Somersby in the British Library notebook reveal the depth of his attachment not merely to Emily but to Somersby itself. The first series, containing nine sonnets, is given the general title 'Somersby Sonnets' and all of them are dated April 1830. They provide the setting for what was the first flush of love between Hallam and Emily Tennyson, then aged eighteen and known to him as 'Nem' and, even more variously 'Dolly', 'Miss Dod' or 'Min hertes quene'.