London Days Part 9

In my island study there hung for many years the two best photographs of Tennyson that I ever saw. They were taken by Mrs. Cameron. The first was, I believe, taken about 1870, or '72. It represents the poet seated, and holding with both hands a book half opened in his lap. He wears a black morning coat, closely b.u.t.toned, cut in the fas.h.i.+on of the time. Instead of the big rolling collar usually shown in his portraits, here is the stiff "d.i.c.key" of Piccadilly; the cuffs, too, are in the mode, and over the coat a {118} monocle hangs. It is quite out of the style of other Tennyson portraits with which I am reasonably familiar, but on that account it has a special interest of its own.

The second photograph, to which I have alluded, is not only thoroughly characteristic but has achieved some fame as "The Dirty Monk", and is thus autographed by its original:

"_I prefer 'The Dirty Monk'

to the others of me.

A. Tennyson.

Except one by Mayall._"

When I returned to Freshwater for three or four months in 1913, after several years' absence, I looked, as usual, for this precious pair.

But they had gone, and no one could tell, or would tell, when or where.

Some souvenir hunter must have loved them too well.

There are, or were, some Morland prints, too. George Morland lived and painted in Freshwater, in a bit cottage that stood in front of the site of this house, but which disappeared nearly a century ago. Mrs.

Cameron, could she revisit the glimpses of the moon, would find her quiet old village developed into a sprawling, country town. It had five hundred inhabitants when Tennyson first came to it in a sailboat from the mainland, in 1852, or 1853; it has between five and ten thousand now, west of the Yar. The number s.h.i.+fts with the summer visitors, and the military cannot be counted, for they come and go in a variable stream. Ever since the war began, the fit and the wounded, the trained and the {119} untrained have pa.s.sed through in large numbers, or have stayed for longer or shorter terms. A war town has grown up on a border of the old town. Golden Hill is now an expanse of barrack huts and not of yellow gorse.

Mrs. Cameron believed in getting things done, not in talking about them. She transformed the coal shed at Dimbola into a dark room for developing her negatives; and the poultry house became a studio. When her husband, a recluse who had n't so much as seen the beach for a dozen years, wanted a lawn, she had turf dug by night and laid in the garden. Calling her husband to the window next morning, she pointed to the expanse of new-laid turf and said, "There 's your lawn!" as if any one would deny her power to work miracles.

Farringford, of course, is enclosed by hedges and trees, literally surrounded by them. The house itself is still further protected from the gaze of the outer world by an inner circle of trees and shrubbery.

The estate is bisected by the lovely lane which has been described in every account ever written of Tennyson, and photographed a thousand times. It, in turn, has a hedgerow on each side and is over-arched by elms. It is really an approach to the farm which is attached to the home acres, and through it, for walking purposes, the public has a right-of-way. At the crest of the rising ground is a little green door, set in the high-banked hedge which guards the home lawns, and by this green door the poet would pa.s.s to the down along another lane which runs at right angles to the one a.s.sociated with his {120} name and immediately opposite the green door. A few feet beyond this, a rustic bridge overhead spans Tennyson's Lane, and by this bridge the poet could cross into a woodland without having to enter the Lane, where his privacy might be disturbed, and so walk to Maiden's Croft, where a little green summerhouse stands under the trees and where he often wrote and meditated. From this summerhouse he had the best view of the beautiful and n.o.ble down. From the windows of Farringford there are exquisite views of seascape and landscape, with lush fields in the foreground,--a view, on sunny days, of quite un-English colour. In the distance St. Catherine's Point and above it the white crown of the Landslip, and above that the dark shape of St. Boniface Down, lifting its head eight hundred feet toward the clouds; in the middle distance a tumble of green hills, and to the right the sea dappled with shafts of light and colour ever changing,--mauves and blues and greens, splashed with browns and reds, s.h.i.+fting and playing there under the sun. It might be Italian sea and Italian landscape. And Tennyson called it his "bit of Italy." You can see it just as he saw it, if you pause at an iron gate on your left, near the top of the rise in the Lane, and you will have in the foreground a group of Italian-like trees beyond which Stag Rock and Arched Rock stand with their feet in the tiny bay. It is of all bits of English land and water one of the most memorable for form and colour,--this little Italy. And it drew Tennyson to Farringford and held him there.

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Tennyson was not seen much in the village, but he often walked to the bay. Here is my first glimpse of him: a tall man looking like a cloaked brigand; his head was swallowed by a great hat, soft and black, and he was pointing with a stick.

"Making yourself at home here, aren't you?" he was understood to say in something between a rumble and growl.

An artist friend of mine was seated on a sketching stool at the iron gate, making a study of the "bit of Italy." Before the stool was an easel, a palette, and a box of water colours. Tennyson, who was near-sighted, saw at first only the seated figure on the camp stool, leaning back against the open gate and gazing at the unique view.

"Very much at home," continued the poet.

The right-of-way was for walking only, not for sitting in chairs and enc.u.mbering the earth with easels and general impedimenta of the fine arts. My friend, who was a stranger in the land, had probably not thought of this, and, having a sudden consciousness of intrusion, whispered to me, around the hedge:

"Tennyson! O Lord!"

The great man drew nearer, and then, taking in the situation, said:

"Ah, painting! Brothers in art. Good morning!"

This was perhaps tender treatment as compared with what we had heard a pair of strangers might have expected. But my friend, although flurried because Jove had pa.s.sed, remained at work. I forget, though, whether the sketch was ever completed. {122} I was curious enough, however, to pa.s.s on, by a detour, in the hope of seeing Jove on his homeward stroll. But he had vanished, and there were no thunderings, near or far.

Mrs. Cameron and her household, after years at enlivening and photographing Freshwater, returned to Ceylon. The departure was an occasion for a liberal distribution of photographs among the inhabitants of the West Wight; and where there was a souvenir to be given or a tip to be left, mounted portraits of celebrities, or of models dressed as characters in fiction or poetry, were handed out.

Thus it happened that many of the pleasant lodging-houses in the vicinity became galleries of Cameron art.

"Ideal" Ward had built a country mansion within a mile of Farringford.

It was called Weston Manor. The eminent Catholic scholar and writer was, of course, a friend of Tennyson. And the two would dispute, of course, about religion, or, rather, about theology, without the slightest effect upon each other's opinions. The house is still in the possession of the Ward family, but is not occupied by them. For some years the private chaplain at Weston Manor was Father Peter Haythornthwaite, a most agreeable and hard-working man. Father Peter, as they called him in the island, was also a friend of Tennyson and frequently a companion of his walks. He told me an amusing story connected with his first dinner at Farringford. Tennyson had an Irish maid, Mary by name. The family were very fond of her; her devotion to them was equalled only by her zeal in serving them, which she would {123} sometimes do in a domineering, if loyal manner, to which the poet bowed submissively. Tennyson disliked formality and stiffness, and was uncomfortable in a dress suit and starched s.h.i.+rt. Dressing for dinner he avoided whenever he could. Mary had laid out his most ceremonious clothes.

"Put them away," said he. "I 'll not wear them!"

Mary insisted.

"Now, I see," said Tennyson. "I am to wear them for that priest, eh?"

"Plaze, sir!"

"Will he come in his altar robes and stole?"

"The saints forbid!" said she.

"If they forbid him, why should they compel me?" he asked.

"It 's I, yer Honour, that tell ye, for the sake of the house! And he 's a man of G.o.d."

"I could n't resist that, could I?" the poet asked of Father Peter.

"And so," said he, "I dressed."

At the table one evening, Tennyson, being in a humorous mood, composed rhyming epitaphs upon every name that occurred to him.

"What would you say of me?" asked Father Peter.

Instantly this couplet rolled from the lips of the host:

"Here lies P. Haythornthwaite, Human by nature, Roman by fate."

A letter of Mrs. Cameron's came under my observation one day, and I was permitted to make a note from it. "Tennyson," she wrote, "was very violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for {124} autographs.

He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world was connected with the pa.s.sion for autographs and anecdotes and records; that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; and that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked G.o.d Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and would know nothing, of Jane Austen; and that there were no letters preserved, either of Shakespeare's, or of Jane Austen's; and that they had not been ripped open like pigs. Then he said that the post for two days had brought him no letters, and that he thought there was a sort of syncope in the world as to him and his fame."

That last touch is delicious. Tennyson did not like to be ignored. He was proud, and justly proud, of his fame. Sir Edwin Arnold said: "Tennyson had a n.o.ble vanity, a proud pleasure in the very notoriety which brought strangers peeping and stealing about his gates." Perhaps so, but it was a case of "It needs be that offences come, but woe be to him through whom the offence cometh." He hated to have tributes thrust upon him; he hated intrusions upon his privacy, and had suffered too much from that sort of thing at Farringford when summer visitors overran Freshwater. He liked to be recognised along the country roads; he liked to have people lift their hats to him; he liked to know that his work meant something to the pa.s.ser by. But he shunned the merely curious stranger.

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And so it was natural enough that he should have built a summer home on the mainland, Aldworth, where there was no summer resort and no plague of the curious. His friend, James Knowles, of the _Nineteenth Century_, designed the house, and there Tennyson pa.s.sed many happy summers and autumns. And there, on a moonlit night in the autumn of 1892, he died. Whether he loved Farringford more, or Aldworth more, I do not know. But probably he was as much attached to one as to the other, for each had its special a.s.sociations.

The Tennysonian cloak, the Tennysonian hat, the rolling collar, and the touzled beard and hair were not unique. There lived at one time in Freshwater a brother of the poet. He resembled the poet and dressed like him. At the same time there was another resident of the place who not only resembled Lord Tennyson but "got himself up" in close imitation of his dress and manner. He was a warm admirer of Tennyson, and was immensely flattered to be mistaken for him by strangers. Small boys of the neighbourhood learned speedily to extract penny tips from this adoring person by pretending to mistake him for their celebrated townsman. On the whole it was rather a good thing to have three figures in the place, any one of which might be looked upon or followed by the summer visitor as the famous poet. It might be puzzling if the stranger met two or three Tennysons in a mile, but two of them could easily divert attention from the third, who was skilled in avoiding strangers.

There was an aged man who had been a gardener {126} at Farringford and was living on a little pension from that quarter. One morning he heard that the Poet Laureate had died. Meeting Father Peter in the road he expressed his grief that "his pore luds.h.i.+p have pa.s.sed away." Then, with much concern for the succession, he asked:

"D'ye think likely Mr. Hallam will follow his father's business?"

Father Peter thought it quite unlikely.

"Ah," said the pensioner, much relieved. "I think nowt on 't, nowt!"

I have seen Farringford described as "a beautifully wooded gentleman's park." It must, at least, be acknowledged that if the gentleman were not beautifully wooded, he lived there, and that he lived a beautiful and serene life, a n.o.ble life, adding greatly to the fame of England, and no less to the human lot. Forty of his eighty-three years were Farringford years. Never was poet more happily placed than in this earthly paradise. Every circ.u.mstance of loyalty and love, of understanding and devotion, surrounded him here and at Aldworth. And never had genius a more devoted aid than Tennyson had in his son Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson, s.h.i.+eld and buckler to his father and to his gentle mother, the dear lady who seemed like a spirit held on earth only by the devotion of husband and son. A family life richer and more tender one does not know among all the lives that one has seen, or ever heard of. To write more about it now would be impious.

Shortly after Tennyson had been buried in Westminster {127} Abbey, on an October day in 1892, a committee of his neighbours in Freshwater was formed for the purpose of erecting some memorial in the rural region where half his life had been pa.s.sed. The memorial was meant to be a local and neighbourly undertaking, and it was thought, naturally enough, that it might be carried out in the form of a monument, tablet, or window, in the village church. But a more fitting idea was adopted.

There stood on the summit of the High Down, "Tennyson's Down" as it is more generally known, a great beacon of heavy, blackened timber surmounted by a cresset, in which, on old nights, long ago, fire had blazed when alarms were signalled from hill to hill along the coast.

This beacon had been taken over by the Lighthouse Board and had served through decades as a mark for navigation for the endless processions of s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing up and down the English Channel and through the Solent by the Needles. Six or seven hundred feet above the sea, and near the edge of a long white cliff, it was easily seen by navigators bound inward or outward. For forty years Tennyson had made it a point of call in his almost daily walks. The committee believed that in the place of the old wooden structure a granite shaft could be erected, serving at once as a memorial to Tennyson and a beacon to seamen.