Kitabı oku: «London Days: A Book of Reminiscences», sayfa 7
CHAPTER IX
TENNYSON
Freshwater is an overgrown village which sprawls about the western end of the lovely Isle of Wight. The meanness of much of its masonry is compensated by its remarkably wholesome air. Man has done his best to spoil Freshwater, but he has not wholly succeeded—yet. Give him time, and more radicalism, and he will make it one of the ugly spots of earth. I made its acquaintance in the early spring of 1882, and subsequently have visited it many times.
When I first made acquaintance with Freshwater, there was no railway within eleven miles, Newport being the terminus of the island lines which were as drolly inconvenient as they are now. The fiddling, amateurish railway, which has come in since then, has not only robbed Freshwater of its seclusion but has saddled parts of the rolling country with shabby streets of mean houses worthy of a Montana mining town. Towards the downs and the sea much of the old charm remains. About Farringford it is undisturbed. And it was at Farringford, that lovely estate, that Tennyson lived.
I had quarters in a house that faced the sea. And these quarters were mine whenever, in the thirty-six years since that delightful May, I returned to Freshwater. They are mine no longer. The house has become an hotel. Now, in the thirty-eighth year of my Freshwatering, I have lodgment elsewhere. The house that sheltered me so long is scarcely a quarter of a mile from Tennyson's Lane, and many of the poet's friends have stayed in it, and friends of Watts, for that great artist also lived in Freshwater, first at a house which is now called Dimbola, and subsequently at "The Briary", a charming home built by the Prinseps and facing Tennyson's "noble Down." In the rooms to which I have so often retreated, and where I so often watched the blue Channel dancing in the sunshine, there are, or were, many mementos of past days. Some of them were photographs, and, as any one who knows the Freshwater legends may guess, they were taken by Mrs. Cameron, the first of the artist photographers, and, in her day, the celebrator of all the celebrated who came to Freshwater to visit the poet.
Mrs. Cameron lived at Dimbola which is at the southeastern corner of the Farringford estate. "She were a concentric lady who wore velvet gowns a-trailin' in the dusty roads," as one old-timer described her to me. Her photography was not professional but amateur, and her skill in it was quite remarkable. So was her persistence. She would not permit a possible "subject" to escape without "taking" him or her. She was quite intimate with the Tennysons, and always called the poet by his Christian name. One day, while there was a smallpox scare about, she rushed to Farringford, with a stranger in tow, and finding Tennyson within, she opened the door of the room where he was sitting, and bidding the stranger follow, cried, "Alfred, I 've brought a doctor to vaccinate you. You must be vaccinated!"
Tennyson, horrified, fled to an adjoining room and bolted the door after him.
"Alfred, Alfred," Mrs. Cameron called, "I've brought a doctor. You must be vaccinated; you really must!"
There was no reply.
"Oh, Alfred, you 're a coward! Come and be vaccinated!"
She won.
When Garibaldi visited Tennyson, he planted a tree in the Farringford grounds. And Mrs. Cameron planted herself before him, and begged him to come and be photographed. Rather eccentric, as my old-timer had tried to convey, she had that morning hastened to Farringford without hat, or gloves, and with her sleeves rolled up, just as she came from her "dark room", and her hands were stained with photographic chemicals. Garibaldi seems to have taken her for a beggar and was turning away, when she knelt before him and implored him to let her photograph him.
Again she won. She always won in such contests.
Mrs. Cameron's day was before the days of dry plates and films. The accumulation of negatives that she left when, with her husband, she returned to Ceylon, where they had formerly lived for many years, passed into the possession of a son. I do not know what has been their subsequent fate; but if uninjured they would be very interesting now, and a collection of prints from them would have a value all its own. She made a number, I daresay many photographs of Tennyson and the members of his family; and when Longfellow came to Farringford, the good lady triumphantly proclaimed him a captive.
She was a kind-hearted, good-natured soul, but when she wanted to carry a point she could be as imperious and decisive as any one that ever lived in the Isle. The neighbourhood children she would persuade by "sweeties", or, failing these, by main force, to "come and be photographed" in this character or that, and there were maid servants with classic faces and ploughmen with fine heads who posed for her as characters in plays and poems, in costumes which she would improvise. Mrs. Cameron was a generous, interesting, impulsive woman. Much of Freshwater legend gathers about her, and her camera, and her diligence in amateur theatricals.
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 buttoned, cut in the fashion of the time. Instead of the big rolling collar usually shown in his portraits, here is the stiff "dickey" of Piccadilly; the cuffs, too, are in the mode, and over the coat a 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 shifts 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 untrained have passed 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 pass to the down along another lane which runs at right angles to the one associated with his 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 noble 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, shifting 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.
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 encumbering 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 passed, remained at work. I forget, though, whether the sketch was ever completed. I was curious enough, however, to pass 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 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 shirt. 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 God."
"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 autographs. He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world was connected with the passion 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 God 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 noble 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 passer by. But he shunned the merely curious stranger.
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 passed 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 associations.
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 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 ludship have passed 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 noble 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 circumstance 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, shield 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 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 passed. 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 ships passing 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.
The Reverend Doctor Merriman, Rector of Freshwater, Colonel Crozier, Doctor Hollis, and others, invited me to join the committee, and I did so, suggesting that Americans would wish to share in erecting the proposed memorial, but that it would be scarcely possible for them to participate were the object undertaken purely as a village or neighbourhood tribute. The broader suggestion was adopted. A Celtic cross in Cornish granite was designed by Mr. J. L. Pearson, of the Royal Academy, and the Brethren of Trinity House (the Lighthouse Board) consented to preserve it in perpetuity if the committee would provide for its erection. I communicated with my old friend, Mrs. James T. Fields of Boston, the widow of Tennyson's American publisher, and she brought together an American committee for the purpose of coöperating with the one in Freshwater. Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes became her first associate and the first American subscriber. The daughters of Longfellow and Lowell were members of the American committee, and so were Mrs. Agassiz, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Margaret Deland, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mr. H. O. Houghton, Mr. George H. Mifflin, and others. Several American newspapers courteously drew attention to the proposed memorial, and Mr. George W. Smalley made an appeal through the New York Tribune, as I did through other papers. Subscriptions were purposely confined to small amounts so that the humblest lover of Tennyson could contribute his mite. I remember that among the first to come were twenty-five cents "from a bricklayer", and "a dollar from a proof reader."
The cross was erected and now, a quarter of a century later, it shows scarcely a sign of weather, though it fronts the sun, and the storms beat upon it, seven hundred feet above the sea. It bears this inscription:
IN MEMORY
OF ALFRED
LORD TENNYSON
THIS CROSS IS
RAISED A BEACON
TO SAILORS BY
THE PEOPLE OF
FRESHWATER AND
OTHER FRIENDS
IN ENGLAND
AND AMERICA
Cliff-erosion causes the precipitous brink to creep slowly toward the cross. By or before the middle of the present century it may become necessary to remove the Beacon Cross some yards to the north.
It was, I think, on the day of Tennyson's burial that the following letter appeared in the Times, over the signature P.L.I.
"Perhaps the following anecdotes may be of interest, related as they were in a paper read privately by the late James T. Fields, in 1872, during my stay in Boston.
"Mr. Fields said that while staying with the poet at Farringford, Tennyson said at midnight, 'Fields, let 's take a walk!' It was a dark and wild night, the sea breaking at the foot of the cliffs. Knowing the dangers of the place and his near-sightedness, I feared for his safety; however, he trudged on through the thick grass with his stick, I also using the one he had lent me on setting out.
"Presently he dropped on hands and knees in the grass. Alarmed I asked, 'What is the matter?' He answered in a strong, Lincolnshire accent, 'Violets, man, violets! Get thee down and have a smell; it will make thee sleep the better!' He had detected them by his acute sense of smell, aided by his strong love of nature. I dropped down, and the sense of the ridiculous struck me forcibly,—in such a position at midnight lying in the thick grass. He joined in my laughter, and we started for home.
"He was egotistical to an extreme, but it was superb, and deeply impressed one. An old lady once, sitting next to Tennyson while some of his poems were being read, exclaimed, 'Oh! how exquisite!' 'I should say it was,' replied the poet. At another time he said no one could read 'Maud' but himself. 'Fields, come and see me, and I will give you "Maud" so that you will never forget it.' This was perfectly true. I felt I could have listened to him forever, and would go any distance to hear it as he gave it."
There was much more to the same purpose. But Mr. Fields, like several others who have written about Tennyson, may have over-emphasised the poet's "egotism." Tennyson was an absolutely honest man. He said what he thought. If another said that his work was "exquisite" or "superb", or this, or that, he would not affect a self-depreciation which he did not feel. That would have been dishonest. If the work were fine, he knew it and said so. If it were over-praised, he said that too. He was not imposed upon by flattery, and he hated that and detected it easily enough. The "violet" incident above has been quoted frequently. It is quoted here because Mr. Fields was mistaken about "the thick grass." That does not grow on the down. Besides the furze bushes, there is only close-cropped turf. If he walked through "thick grass" it may have been on the way to and from the down, perhaps, by the way of Maiden's Croft. And on the down the poet would have been in no peril through his short-sightedness. He was a countryman, and knew every inch of the way. A countryman can tell by the slope of the ground, by "the lie of the land" under his feet, whether or not the down is leading him astray. If he is sure-footed, far sight will not help him much in the dark. But Fields, although a kindly soul, was a publisher, and he might easily have felt "ridiculous" when kneeling at the feet of a poet.
A diligent antiquary lived at Freshwater in Tennyson's time. He lived in Easton Cottage, nearly opposite the road-end of Tennyson's Lane. His name was Robert Walker, and he was well advanced in age. When I knew him, in the nineties, he was very deaf, so that talking with him was tiresome. But he had interesting talk to give, even if he received none in return. He had been a dealer in antiques, I forget where, but I remember that he told me he had made and lost two fortunes, and was sheltering his last years under the shreds of the second. He told me, too, that he had been offered the curatorship of a well-known museum, but had declined, preferring retirement in Freshwater. I have a vague recollection of being shown the correspondence. But, at any rate, the old man promised to confer new fame on Freshwater by proving that it had very ancient fame, indeed, as a harbourage and stage in the overland route to the tin mines of Cornwall in the time of the Phoenicians!
His argument was something like this: In the obscure past there were Phoenicians. So much we grant. They conducted with the world at large, or with as much of it as was then known, a trade in tin. Strabo tells us so. Whence came their tin? From Cornwall. And how did they get to Cornwall? By the Isle of Wight, which seems a roundabout way, but was not so. The "ships" of the Phoenicians "were little more than open boats, partly decked, and liable to be swamped by the dash of the waves over their sides and prows. They were propelled by rowers, numbering from thirty to fifty; if wind served they stepped a single mast and hoisted a single sail." They avoided the heavy seas of the Bay of Biscay, and came by the rivers of France. Up from the Mediterranean they would proceed by the Rhone to where Lyons is now. There they would leave their vessels. From there overland to the Seine, where they had another fleet awaiting them. Then down the Seine to where Havre, or Barfleur, or Cherbourg stand now, and thence across the Channel to the Isle of Wight, the nearest front of barbarian England.
Freshwater was then an island. It is almost an island now. The little tidal river, Yar, rises within a few yards of the Channel and flows north, to the Solent. In those days there was probably no beach at Freshwater Bay; the present beach was formed after modern man had constructed a causeway there. In those days the waters of the Channel flowed into the Yar, making a shallow estuary sufficient for an anchorage, where the Phoenician craft could lie while their adventurous crews were following the Cornish trail, a feat easily performed, because, in those days, the Isle of Wight was doubtless joined to the mainland at Hurst Castle. If it were not it should have been, in order to add interest to the story.
About the beginning of the eighteen-nineties workmen were widening and lowering the road which skirts Farringford and the Briary, and gives an entrance to the rear of Weston Manor. They dug so closely into a Weston hedge that, in going below the subsoil of it, they discovered the remains of ancient structures containing pottery, ash, charcoal, lime, enamelled bricks, and so on. Walker declared the remains were Phoenician, and the site that of a crematorium and a pottery. He cited evidence which I have not space to record. Being an antiquary he turned on other antiquaries. He wrote a pamphlet. The Antiquary magazine took up the case and cited similar discoveries, undoubtedly Phoenician, in South Devon. Warm arguments for and against the Phoenician theory were thrown back and forth. And Freshwater laughed. It was sure, and is sure still, that the anti-Phoenicians had the best of it, and Neighbour Walker the worst of it. A neighbour would have the worst of it, of course. But Walker persuaded the Ward of the time (Granville) to preserve the discoveries and to erect above them two protecting domes of concrete. Walker, I think, had the best of it, for if he could not prove the remains to have been Phoenician, his adversaries could not prove them to have been anything else. The antiquary is dead, and the local cabmen point, with the scorn of their calling, to "Walker's Pups" in the hedgerow as you drive to Totland or Alum Bay.
Local prophets, here as elsewhere, may prophesy without excess of honour. Tennyson himself used to tell an anecdote which had the run of the village:
"There 's Farringford," said a cabman to a visiting "fare."
"Ah!" responded the latter, "a great man lives there."
"D' ye call him great?" retorted cabby. "He only keeps one man, and he don't sleep in the house!"
Just as I reach this point in this chapter, there comes to me, in Hampshire, the news of Lady Ritchie's death. This means the breaking of almost the last link of that old Island circle. And it means the vanishing from life of one of the sweetest and dearest old ladies I have ever known. She was Thackeray's eldest daughter.
