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 {115} 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, {116} 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 {117} 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 {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 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 {119} 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 {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 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.
{121}
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. {122} 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
{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 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 {124} 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.
{125}
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 {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 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 {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 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 {128} 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 cooperating
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, {129} 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.
{130}
"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 {131} "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
{132} 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 {133} 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. {134} 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.
When my wife and I left the Island, late in 1918, Lady Ritchie was one
of the last friends we saw. She came to our gate to say good-bye. She
was then over eighty-one. How many of my friends are more than eighty!
The most active youth is ninety-three! He also is an Isle of Wighter.
Lady Ritchie was an Isle of Wighter half of every year. She had first
visited Freshwater with her father {135} when she was a child, and her
association with it had never ceased since then. For many years past
she had a little house there. "The Porch" it was called. The colder
half of the year she lived in London, in St. Leonard's Terrace,
Chelsea; the warmer half at "The Porch." In 1918, when Chelsea
Hospital, the home of the red-coated Old Pensioners, was bombed by
German aircraft, she had a narrow escape. Her house faces the hospital
grounds, and every window pane in the front was shattered. She was
sitting in her drawing-room at the time, but was unhurt by the flying
glass and unruffled by the flashing and crashing all about her. She
was then approaching her eighty-first birthday. But ladies of
eighty-one, however unconquerable, do not go through such an experience
without nerve strain. When I saw her again, a few weeks later, she,
for the first time, seemed conscious that age was advancing upon her.
The pleasant little gatherings became fewer; she was much fatigued
after them. But her spirits were as high as ever, and her thought as
kindly.
When the United States entered the war, she came to me with a jubilant
letter from an old friend of hers in New York. Her friend had written,
"I rejoice that you and I are now fighting together, side by side."
"Yes, yes," said Lady Ritchie, reading the letter to me, "think of it!
Two old ladies of eighty fighting shoulder to shoulder!" And
straightway she made a little American flag which she hung at "The
Porch" door, alongside a Union Jack.
{136}
She was, I think, the last of that once considerable group whose
members always addressed, and alluded to, the first Lord Tennyson as
"Alfred." And she was as full of stories of him as an egg is of meat.
The last time we passed Farringford together, she said:
"I like to think of the expression on Alfred's face when he was told
that a new boy-in-buttons, a country lad whom he had just taken into
service, answered the doorbell one day, and saw a tall, sedate
gentleman standing there.
"'Tell your master that the Prince Consort has called,' he said to the
boy.
"'Oh, crickey!' exclaimed the youngster, who fled to the innermost
parts of the house.
"Somehow, I forget how, the message was conveyed to Alfred, who found
the Prince waiting at the door, still laughing at the boy's
consternation. The Island life was fairly simple in those days."
And what is left of that old life is gracious, kindly, hospitable. In
no place in any part of the earth have I met with greater kindliness
than in Freshwater. That is why I am fond of the West Wight and have
been there so often. I wonder if ever I shall go there again. Once I
crossed the Atlantic to go there and only there. And now, to-day that
gracious lady of the old time has gone, never to return. How kindly
she was, and gentle! What sweet dignity and thoughtfulness, a manner
that was not put on and off like a gown. It was innate. There are few
left in the world like that dear lady. The present generation calls
them old-fashioned. {137} Theirs was indeed an old fashion, and the
world is poorer because it does not know how to match it. Their spirit
was not the spirit of the age as we see it at the dawn of the third
decade of the Twentieth Century. Farewell, dear lady, you were
Thackeray's finest work!
{138}