Angels and Insects (34 page)

Now
that
was both gruesome and in some way beautiful, making the dead a part of nature. Worse, more savage, was

The breeding of ‘lower life’ had also haunted her own dreams—indeed had begun to cease to do so only shortly before
In Memoriam
, published in 1850, seventeen years after Arthur’s death and eight years after her own marriage, which should have purged some of the horrors.
In Memoriam
had reawakened much that had lain quiet. Alfred’s mourning had been long and steadfast. It put hers, however fierce, however dark, however passionate, ultimately to shame. Nevertheless she had moments of violence. On receiving Hallam Tennyson’s letter, alone in her drawing-room, she had strode up and down as though the room were too small, and cried out to emptiness, ‘Let him buy it back then and scent it with violets!’ Violets budded all over
In Memoriam
. ‘My regret / Becomes an April violet / And buds and blossoms with the rest.”

Arthur had written, in that savaged review, of Alfred, ‘When this Poet dies, will not the Graces and the Loves mourn over him,
“fortunataque favilla nascentur violae”
?’ and Alfred had turned the compliment on dead Arthur, mourning him in violets. In grim moods, of which she had her share, Emily Jesse had compared the
Remains
to Isabella’s pot of basil, which produced balmy perfumed leafits because it was watered by grieving tears and drew

It was wrong, she knew it was wrong, to see Arthur in terms of mouldering heads and moral oppression. When he came to Somersby he had made it into a real Summerland of its own, a land of Romance. She could see him now, leaping down out of the gig into the lane, under the trees, embracing Alfred, Charles, Frederick, his Cambridge friends, smiling amiably at the younger boys and the assembled garden of girls, Mary the beauty, Cecilia the intelligent, Matilda the damaged innocent, Emilia, Emily, the wild and shy. ‘I love you all,’ he had told them, sitting out on the lawn in the evening light, ‘I am in love with every one of you, however romantic, however prosaic, however strange and fantastic, however resolutely down-to-earth.” He had put up his arms in a great circular gesture embracing them all, which echoed, or more properly was echoed, in the gestures of the witch-elms, in
In Memoriam
, the trees who ‘Laid their dark arms about the field’. She remembered them reading Dante and Petrarch aloud, she remembered singing and playing the harp, and Arthur’s watching, delighted, ear and eye, gave the music a kind of perfection of intention and resonance they never had when the family played and sang only to itself. And this too, Alfred had captured perfectly, perfectly, in the poetry of memory, in memoriam, so that though her own phantom
voice still sounded in phantom moonlight in her private recollection, it was always accompanied by his words.

She thought Arthur had at first been undecided whether he was to be in love with Mary or with herself. She was quite a sharply
noticing
girl when not bursting with passionate feeling, and she herself at first had only shared the general Tennyson-worship of this bright being. He sat down and wrote poems to both of them, to Emily and Mary, he admired both pairs of dark eyes, he brought back little posies of wild flowers for both girls from his ramblings with Alfred in the woods. He had a kind of accomplished town-flirtatiousness with women, which alarmed Emily more than the composed Mary, and caused her to see herself as a country-mouse, though before his arrival she had seen herself, particularly on horseback, as a wild Byronic heroine, only waiting for her elegant Prince to remove her to her proper sphere. She quite decided he would love Mary, whom she also loved, and loved to this day, sharing with her the visionary hopes and delights of the New Jerusalem Church and the spiritualist discoveries.

And then they had come upon each other in the Fairy Wood, he and she, when the whole rambling family had somehow become separated. It was April 1830 and the weather was all watery and silver-gold light, and the sky was full of movement, long racing ribbons of clouds, and veils of water, and rainbow-flashes, and the
trees were both sombre-stemmed and alive with a veil of bright green buds, and the earth smelled mouldy and was spattered all over with pale windflowers and glossy yellow celandine. And she had stood at one side of the glade, breathing fast because she had been running, and he had stood at the other, with the light behind him like a halo and his face in shadow, Alfred’s friend, Arthur, and he had said, ‘You look, you really look, like a wandering fairy or dryad. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life.’ Some women, remembering this scene, might have remembered a vision of themselves to fill the space at her side of the glade, or to balance his eager, smiling one at his, but Emily was not a mirror-gazer, she carried no such self-image. She could not even remember what she had been wearing. Only the energy of his pleasure at seeing her, and her stepping towards him, for this moment not Alfred’s friend, but a young man who
saw her
and was full of equally balanced apprehension and anticipation. So she had walked towards him across the flower-carpet, in the smell of leaf-mould, and he had taken both her hands and said, ‘You know I have been falling in love with you for what seems like forever, and can only really have been four weeks?’

She always thought of the centre of her love for Arthur in this way, of two creatures joining hands in a leafy, flowery thicket. Such a thicket, Arthur said, for he shared, indeed created the sacredness of that moment, as was the English type, such as might have been met in Malory or Spenser, of the eternal sacred groves of Nemi and Dodona. He addressed his letters to Nem, to dearest Dod, a childish lisping of something daemonic, or so she hoped. He compared her to the Fair Persian in Alfred’s
Recollections of the Arabian Nights
, ‘tressèd with redolent ebony, / In many a dark delicious curl’. He compared their grove in the Fairy Wood to the ‘Blackgreen bowers and grots’ of that rich vision, and recited, in his clear, modulated voice, higher than Alfred’s rich grumble, the vision of the Nightingale in the grove.

Somersby in those days was a place created and rendered timeless by the imagination, which sang like the Nightingale. Alfred’s
Ode to Memory
, like the
Recollections of the Arabian Nights
, was a young man’s first recording, he said, of the sense that he already had an irrevocable Past of his own, his childhood reading, the earthly Paradise he made out of the garden. As they got older the Tennysons more and more remembered the Rectory garden in his words:

Emily Jesse shuffled the spirit papers in her gipsy hands as she found herself caught again in the thicket of thoughts that surrounded timeless Somersby, made by men, made for men. There was Alfred, desiring to live alone with his friend, to whom he gave, without irony, Coleridge’s epithet of high praise for Shakespeare, ‘myriad-minded’. It was not that she was
jealous of Alfred
—how could she be? It was she, Emily, Arthur meant to marry, it was her approach that made him catch his breath, it was on her lips that he pressed those nervous, urgent kisses. He was eager for marriage, he burned for it, that was clear enough. Alfred was different. Alfred had most terribly tried the patience of Emily Sellwood, sister to Charles’s much-loved wife, Louisa. He had teased out their engagement, on, off, on, off, over twelve long years, marrying her finally in 1850, the year of
In Memoriam
, when she was thirty-seven, and her youth was irrevocably gone. Emily Jesse had received desperate letters in her time from Emily Sellwood, begging her for some assurance of continuing love and friendship, whilst Alfred gloomed and equivocated, and went away, and wrote. It was curious, Emily Jesse always thought, that Emily Sellwood would tell again and again the story of meeting Alfred in Holywell Wood, when she was walking there with Arthur.

‘I was wearing my light-blue dress,’ Emily Sellwood would say, ‘and Alfred suddenly appeared through the trees in a long blue cloak, and said to me, “Are you a dryad or a Naiad or what are you?” And I was suddenly quite sure that I loved him, and I have never wavered in that love, whatever the temptations, whatever the pain.’

Emily Jesse imagined the young men talking together in the room they shared at night. She imagined Arthur telling Alfred, as they lay smoking on the two white couches in the attic room, about his vision of her in the Fairy Wood, and Alfred turning it into a kind of poem in his head, which he found himself suddenly enacting, faced with another Emily, in another blue dress, on
Arthur’s arm. Alfred
diffused
everything so fast into poetry. He never had been very able to distinguish one human being from another—Jane Carlyle, one of his most intimate friends, meeting him at one of Dickens’s theatrical parties in 1844, had found herself taken by the hand and told earnestly, ‘I should like to know who you are—I know that I know you, but I cannot tell your name.’ Emily Jesse thought that Emily Sellwood’s response to the dryad-greeting had brought a hard fate on her, though in the end she had a sort of happiness. Two sons, and a devoted Laureate-husband, who drew her about his grounds in an invalid-carriage.

Women gossiping together, she knew, made love-affairs thrilling. What a man said, how he looked, what he dared, his masterfulness, his charming timidity, all this stuff of Romance was woven and knitted delightfully in quiet talk, so that a woman again alone with her professed lover after she had most thoroughly talked him over with her sisters and friends would feel a sudden shock, perhaps exciting, perhaps daunting, perhaps disappointing, at his
difference
from this created figure. She did not know what men made of women when they talked of them. Conventionally, it was believed that they had different, and higher topics to engage them. ‘Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.’ Arthur and Alfred had discussed herself and Emily Sellwood. In what terms?

If she was wholly truthful with herself, she remembered the sight of those two male backs, those two pairs of eagerly climbing legs, going up to the attic with the white beds, with the sensations of one excluded from Paradise. They talked away about love and beauty, sometimes till dawn; she caught the echoes of the indecipherable flow of words, the ruminative grumble, the quick, decisive, leaping voice. From time to time she could hear recitation. The ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. On a Grecian Urn.’ ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’—she knew the words, she could add the rest, as the rhythm hummed. Arthur had praised Alfred’s poems by comparing him with Keats and Shelley. He called him a ‘poet of sensation’, he
quoted the letters of the tragically dead young poet. ‘O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!’ he echoed, approvingly, praising Alfred for reaching the ideas of good, perfection, truth, suffused by the colouring of ‘the energetic principle of love for the beautiful’. Arthur’s God, in the ‘Theodicaea’, he had claimed, had created the Universe full of sin and sorrow, in order to experience Love, for His Son, as he redeemed the fallen world and made it beautiful.

She had once come upon those two, sitting out on the lawn, reclining in wicker chairs with their heads thrown back on battered cushions, discussing, in a male way, the Nature of Things. Alfred’s pipe-smoke curled up into the air and diffused itself. Arthur stabbed at the lawn with a kind of prong with which the gardener—obstructed and protested against by the weed-loving Tennysons—tried ineffectively to grub up daisies and clover.

‘It all comes out of the old Neoplatonic mythic belief,’ Arthur said. ‘The Mind, the higher Mind, Nous, immerses itself in inert Matter, Hyle, and creates life and beauty. The Nous is male and the Hyle female, as Ouranos, the sky, is male, and Ge, the earth, is female, as Christ, the Logos, the Word, is male, and the soul he animates is female.’

The young Emily Tennyson, carrying her basket of books, Keats and Shakespeare,
Undine
and
Emma
, passed in front of them and peered between her veils of dark hair at them. They lay back and looked up at her contentedly. Between the sagging wicker arms their two hands almost touched on the turf, one stretched towards the other, one dirty-brown, one well-tended and white.

‘Why?’ said Emily Tennyson.

‘Why what, my dearest?’ said Arthur. ‘What a picture you make, against the roses, with the wind in your hair. Don’t move, I love to see you.’