Chapter IV: Part 4

Into the nook beyond, crossed each way in an hour’s walk, is packed some of the finest scenery of the Island--the finest of all, some will say, who find the rich charms of the Undercliff more cloying. On the south side the Downs raise their steep wall of chalk to drop into the sea at the Needles point, round which the inner coast shows a more varied line of cliff. Between lies a huddle of very pleasant rurality, bowery lanes, hedgerow paths, thatched cottages, and thick-set hamlets, that in the very breath of the sea recall the most characteristic aspects of the green heart of England. Even the new Church has a thatched roof. But this corner, while more out of the way and the taste of trippers, is a good deal given up to Mars, whose temples here are forts and public-houses. Also it is swept by a bombardment of golf balls, which has caused punsters to suggest that this end of the Island as well as the eastern deserves the name of _Fore_land.

Freshwater itself is a modestly diffused village, which copies modern military tactics in taking very open order against the assaults of time. The main body of the place stands loosely ranked some way back from the shore, to which it throws out an advanced work held against wind and waves by hotels and a picket of bathing-machines; then a chain of rearward outposts connects it with the railway station a mile or so inland. Here the rebuilt Church, with its trappings of antiquity, makes a rallying point for hamlets in the rear, bearing such by-names as School Green, Pound Green, Sheepwash Green and Norton, beyond which the forts on the north side, among their bivouacs of camp followers, are mixed up with lines of new building, in summer garrisoned by holiday-makers on the bathing beaches of Totland Bay and Colwell Bay.

The road from the station to the esplanade passes by a mansion hidden in “a carelessly ordered garden” among thick trees, “close to the ridge of a noble down,” where

Groves of pine on either hand
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary Channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.

The house is more closely sheltered by fine growths like the Wellingtonia planted by Garibaldi, the great cedar, “sighing for Lebanon,” and the grand ilex, also made evergreen by one who was a “lover of trees.” For this is Farringford, famous as the home of Tennyson for more than half his life, and the sojourn of so many contemporary celebrities, guests at his house or at his neighbour Mr Cameron’s, a retired Indian official, whose wife became so notable

by her influence over “Alfred,” by her unconventionally generous impulses, and by her skill in the then young art of photography. Later on the Camerons disappear from their renowned friend’s story, going to die in Ceylon; but all along flit across the page names of renown in both continents, Maurice, Jowett, Sir Henry Taylor, G. F. Watts, Browning, Longfellow, Lowell, O. W. Holmes, and others drawn by the same magnet to this shore.

The mellifluous poet, so dear to his intimates, failed to make himself universally popular in the Island, whose inhabitants were not all able to appreciate him. There is the amusing case of a fly-driver who could not understand the squire of Farringford’s greatness. “Why, they only keep one man, and he doesn’t sleep in the house!” But that some residents could value their illustrious neighbour is shown by another story of a visitor arriving when the house was in a confusion of unpacking, and being kept waiting in the hall till he was recognised as the Prince Consort.

It is pretty well understood that he who figures too much as an alabaster saint in his official biography, had an earthier side to his nature. His gloomy moods and sensitive shyness sometimes broke out in fits of ill-humour, such as caused Mrs Cameron to remonstrate with him on behalf of a friend of hers found trespassing on his domain, who had come expecting to “see a lion, not a bear.” While he shrank in almost morbid horror from peeping pilgrims, he pointed himself out to their gaze by a picturesque “get up,” as to which one of his favoured grandchildren is said to have bluntly asked him, “If you don’t like people to look at you, why do you wear that queer hat and cloak?” I have a story to tell which has not yet, I think, been in print, but was vouched for by one of those concerned. As the Poet-laureate, with his friends Palgrave and Woolner, the sculptor, were walking through a village, irreverent urchins, having no fear of he-or she-bears, ran after them with the cry “Old Jew!”--“Poor Palgrave’s nose!” Tennyson whispered to Woolner, while Palgrave, for his part, presently took the opportunity of an aside to their companion, “That’s what Tennyson gets by dressing himself up in such a way!”

Another story of Tennyson’s manners reached me in two pieces, at a long interval, each dovetailing into each other. I knew a kind and gentle lady who venerated all genius, and especially his who was the flower of Victorian literature. Many years ago she told me, how being invited to see the University boat-race from George Macdonald’s house at Hammersmith, she found herself beside an unknown gentleman of her own mature age, to whom she remarked that it would be well if a window could be opened. He turned his back on her without a word and walked out of the room, which he would not enter again. To her dismay, my friend heard that this was the Poet-laureate, who did not like to be spoken to. She went to her grave hardly able to forgive herself for having unwittingly hurt such a man. Many years afterwards, on his coming to be buried at Westminster, another friend told me how in her girlhood, she was at George Macdonald’s boat-race party, when Tennyson was so offended at being spoken to by an old lady, that he shut himself up in a separate room, to which she was sent with some food for him, in the hope that a mere child might be a David to the mood of Saul; and that he spoke very crossly to her because she had forgotten to bring the mustard.

Why tell such tales? it may be asked by those who remember how Tennyson looked forward with horror to his weaknesses being exposed to the public eye. Because a great man’s life cannot be kept private; and no picture of him is of value with all the warts painted out. Those who knew the poet agree that he had rough ways and some coarse tastes singularly in contrast with the “saccharinity ineffable” which certain tart critics of another generation distaste in his verse. Those who knew him best are most emphatic as to the essential nobility of character that for them veiled all short-comings. The main interest of his life, as a human document, is that a man who had such faults should by force of genius have been able to transmute them into lessons of purity, courtesy, and charity, that will shine all the brighter as rays of a soul not “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.” And there will be an end to all fruitful biography, if the “good taste” so much admired by this generation is to overlay truth. Who would read the memoirs of a former age if they represented Samuel Johnson as a model of polite elegance, Goldsmith of practical common sense, and Wilkes of untarnished public spirit. So, without wanting in honest admiration for the greatest poet of my time, I protest against the conspiracy of silence by which he has been raised to a House of Lords among the immortals, his old cloak and hat forgotten in ermine and coronet, and his strong tobacco and full-bodied port glorified as nectar and ambrosia.

But if there were some to find the poet no more than a man, and others to regret that he let his world-wide fame be obfuscated in such a title as is sold to a prosperous brewer or money-broker, all tongues are at one in praise of the gentle lady still remembered as a devoted wife, as a friendly neighbour, and as an open-handed mistress of the manor. To William Allingham, Tennyson reported the character given of them by an ex-servant: “She is an angel--but he, why he’s only a public writer!” Many a tear was shed when, after long suffering, Lady Tennyson came to rest in the churchyard of Freshwater, her husband lying apart among our renowned dead. Within the Church are memorials of their second son Lionel, whose promising career was cut short by fever in the far East, and he found a hasty grave on a sun-blighted island of the Red Sea.

The bard whose “lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share” indeed, while more than one of his publishers dropped off “flaccid and drained,” was able later on to build himself a retreat on the Sussex wilds of Blackdown, in a sense even further “from noise and smoke of town.” But he still spent part of the year at Farringford; and much of his poetry is coloured by the Isle of Wight scenery, notably _Maud_, that “pet bantling” of his to which early critics were so unkind. Enoch Arden, too, might be thought to have hailed from this shore, but that hazel nuts do not flourish in the Island, unless in the half fossilized form of “Noah’s nuts” found in Compton Chine; also, on critical consideration, there appears no long street climbing out of Freshwater, whose “mouldered church,” moreover, has been quite masked by rebuilding--but these are poetical properties readily inserted into any picture, such as one that could be taken from a hundred villages on our coast--

Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf,
In cluster; then a moulder’d church, and higher,
A long street climbs to one tall-tower’d mill;
And high in heaven behind it a grey down
With Danish barrows; and a hazelwood,
By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes
Green in a cup-like hollow of the down.

Often from these downs, the poet must have watched--

Below the milky steep
Some ship of battle slowly creep,
And on through zones of light and shadow
Glimmer away to the lonely deep.

From his own window, he could catch--

The voice of the long sea-wave as it swelled,
Now and then in the dim-gray dawn.

And often his steps were turned to that finest scene within an hour’s stroll--

The broad white brow of the Isle--that bay with the coloured sand--Rich
was the rose of sunset there, as we drew to the land.

On such points of vantage, he was inspired with loyalty and patriotism very different from the feelings of his predecessor in the laureateship, who “uttered nothing base,” but who was certainly disposed to frown, when, from the Island cliffs, he saw a British fleet sailing forth against the soon clouded dawn of liberty in France.

Tennyson naturally had a dread of new building about Freshwater; and some other landowners here seem to share the same exclusive spirit, which may account for the neighbourhood not being more “developed” as a resort, while its warmest admirers lament how much it has grown since the Laureate settled here. It has no want of attractions, not always accessible on the steep face of chalk, scarred and pitted by works of time like Freshwater Arch and Freshwater Cave near the little bay, beyond which come honeycombings known by such names as “Neptune’s Caves” and “Bar Cave”--“Frenchman’s Hole,” from an escaped prisoner said to have starved here--Lord Holmes’ “Parlour,” “Kitchen,” and “Cellar,” where that governor was in the way

of entertaining his friends--“Roe’s Hall”--“Preston’s Bower”--the “Wedge Rock,” a triangular mass wedged in between the cliff and an isolated pyramid some 50 feet high--the “Arched Cavern” in Scratchell’s Bay, and the “Needles Cave,” into which small boats can peep before rounding the jagged corner. It is said that Professor Tyndall used to keep himself in climbing practice by scrambling on these treacherous rocks; and if this be true, I so far question the wisdom of that pundit. The harrying of airy nests makes a better excuse for such riskful gymnastics. The fissured cliff line is tenanted by sea-fowl, which the report of a gun brings out in screaming and hovering crowds, conspicuous among them the black and white cormorants nicknamed “Isle of Wight parsons.”

These sights are to be visited by boat, if a stranger have stomach for the adventure. On foot one can mount the back of the cliff known at first as the Nodes, then as the Mainbench, or in general as the High Downs. At the highest point of the Nodes, nearly 500 feet, the old beacon has been replaced by an Iona Cross in memory of Tennyson, with whom this was a favourite walk in the wildest weather. A grand walk it is upon a crest of greensward so smooth that bicycles find a track here among the flying golf balls. In dry weather this smooth turf is slippery, as one might find too late on its treacherous edges. Further on, the straight way is barred by a fort, where, between Scratchell’s Bay and Alum Bay, the ridge narrows and drops to the spur pointed by those insular masses known as the “Needles,” that, seen at a hazy distance, rise out of the sea like three castles.

The name of this famous point has been connected with the German _Nieder Fels_; but there seems no need of going further than a homely simile that would come to mind and mouth of sailors who, in another language, have threaded the same suggestion on the southernmost rocks of Africa. Of the three sharp-backed islets that stand out here braving the winds and waves, the innermost is known to have risen 120 feet higher in a tall pillar called “Lot’s Wife,” which fell in 1784. Since Turner painted them, unless they loomed for him through a haze of imagination, the Needles have dwindled in size. Naturally of course they are worn away by every gale, like their kinsmen “Old Harry and his Wife” on the Dorset coast, one of which isolated masses has been washed down to a stump within the last few years, the same end as threatens the “Parson and Clerk” off the red sandstone cliffs of Devon; and in the far north the more robustly gigantic “Old Man of Hoy” has now but one leg to stand on.

Bitten at as they are by old _Edax Rerum_, the Needles have still a bulk which, dwarfed against the cliffs behind, might not be guessed till one’s eyes are fixed upon the lighthouse on the outermost rock, or upon human figures displayed against them, to give their due proportion. Thomas Webster, the geologist, saw them about a century ago under most picturesque conditions, when the fifty-gun frigate _Pomone_ had stuck fast upon the outer edge, and lay captive there, to be broken up by the next gale, the waves already spouting through her ports and hatchways, while all around swarmed a fleet of smaller vessels engaged in salving the wreck, or bringing idle spectators to such a singular scene: he was surprised to find the frigate’s hull overtopped by more than three-fourths of the rock.

On the north side of the Needles opens Alum Bay, where German visitors will not fail to exclaim _Wunderschön!_ and Americans to admire the works of nature as “elegant!” This famous geological transformation scene is formed by the Eocene strata turning up beside the chalk, as at the east end of the Island, but here with more striking effect, so as to be a spectacle for the most unlearned eye as well as a lesson of extraordinary value for those who can read it, through the manner in which the beds have been heaved, contorted and thrown into a vertical position of display. The chalk on one side with its tender tints is faced on the other by variegated bands of clay, marl, and sand, the hues of which, after heavy rain especially, are vivid far beyond our common experience of the “brown old earth,” in some lights presenting the rainbow of colour described by Englefield, to be so often quoted: “deep purplish-red, dusky blue, bright ochreous-yellow, grey approaching nearly to white, and absolute black, succeed each other, as sharply defined as the stripes in silk; and after rain the sun, which, from about noon till his setting in summer, illuminates them more and more, gives a brilliancy to some of these nearly as resplendent as the high lights on real silk.”

His geological ally Webster renders an almost as high-coloured account in more matter-of-fact style. The Alum Bay cliffs, he says,

... consist, generally, of a vast number of alternations of layers
of very pure clay, and pure sand, with ferruginous sand and shale.
Of these beds some are several feet, whilst others are not an
eighth of an inch in thickness. Next to the chalk, is a vertical
bed of chalk marl; then one of clay of a deep red colour, or
sometimes mottled red and white. This is succeeded by a very thick
bed of dark blue clay with green earth, containing nodules of marl
or argillaceous limestone with fossil shells. Then follows a vast
succession of alternating beds of sand of various colours, white,
bright yellow, green, red and grey; plastic clay, white, black,
grey and red; ferruginous sandstone and shale, together with
several beds of a species of coal, or lignite, the vegetable origin
of which is evident. The number and variety of these vertical
layers is quite endless, and I can compare them to nothing better
than the stripes on the leaves of a tulip. On cutting down pieces
of the cliffs, it is astonishing to see the extreme brightness of
the colours, and the delicacy and thinness of the several layers of
white and red sand, shale and white sand, yellow clay and white or
red sand, and indeed almost every imaginable combination of these
materials. These cliffs, although so highly coloured that they
could scarcely come within the limits of picturesque beauty, were
not, however, without their share of harmony. The tints suited each
other admirably; and their whole appearance, though almost beyond
the reach of art to imitate, was extremely pleasing to the eye.
Their forms, divested of colour, when viewed near, and from the
beach, were often of the most sublime class; resembling the
weather-worn peaks of Alpine heights. This circumstance they derive
from the same source as those primitive mountains; for the strata
being vertical, the rains and snow water enter between them, and
wear deep channels, leaving the more solid parts sharp and pointed.

The alum that gives the name to this bay, oozing from its motley face, seems no longer of commercial account; but the pure white sand is used in glass-making, and the coloured sands are arranged in fantastic patterns to make curiosities or memorials for the excursionists who flock to this spot by coach, by steamer from Bournemouth and other seaside towns, or by an hour’s walk from Freshwater station. For their entertainment, there are two hostelries and some humbler refreshment rooms; but as yet Alum Bay has not been turned into a bathing-place, though round its northern corner rises one of the favourite summer resorts of the Island.

Another contrast appears from the hollow behind the bay. The chalk downs on one side are smooth, as if shaved by their own razor-like edges; on the other, Headon Hill swells up in moorland knolls and banks of heather, its rough sides clothed with tufts of yellow flowerets and ragged grass. Headon Warren is a fitting _alias_. From its blunt head, some 400 feet, we look down upon the lower and darker cliffs of the inner coast, studded with brick forts that would be an ugly sight to an enemy seeking to force the passage of the Solent.

We have done now with wonders, but the north-western face of the Island makes a pleasant shore line, on which, in a mile or so, is reached the snug beach of Totland Bay, the chief bathing-place of this end, all new and smart, its big hotel standing out over the pier, like colonel of a regiment of lodging-houses and villas. Round the next corner comes Colwell Bay, another stretch of sand on which a younger resort is growing up beside crumbling cliffs and tiny chines. At the further horn stands Albert Fort, nicknamed the “brick three-decker,” commanding the narrowest part of the Solent, where a long narrow spit from the mainland throws Hurst Castle more than half-way across the three-knot channel, hardly needed as a stepping-stone by any giant who might care to hop over. The next corner, bearing up the Victoria Fort, brings us round to the estuary of the Yar, a stream that shows more estuary than river, opening out with as much complacency as if it drained a basin of ten times three miles. The mouth of this shallow gulf, towards the sea pleasantly masked in woods, is crossed by a causeway leading into Yarmouth.

YARMOUTH

Among its other misfortunes this little Yarmouth has had that of being over-crowed by the bloated renown of Great Yarmouth, which trumpets forth many high notes of interest, from its cathedral-like church and its ancient “Rows,” to its herring fleet and its Cockney paradises. The author of _David Copperfield_ himself might not find much to say about the Isle of Wight Yarmouth, which yet, by its past dignity, seems to demand a chapter, where it must play at least the part of text like that blessed word Mesopotamia. If we writers might never fill a few pages without having anything particular to say, what would become of the circulating libraries? So let us see what may be said under the head of Yarmouth, taken with a stretch of country beyond which deserves to be better known than it is to the Island visitors.

This little town or big village is best known to strangers by the pier of the shortest crossing from Lymington, not indeed the most convenient one, as there is a gap between the landing and the station, and trains of the Freshwater line seem to run in no close connection with the steamers, or make only a mocking show of connection that adds insult to injury. So one may find oneself stranded here for an hour or two, unless he can go straight on by coach to Freshwater Bay or to Totland Bay, to which also some of the steamers run in the season. But weak-stomached voyagers hail the half-hour’s passage as being mostly in the winding mud flats of the Lymington River, with an open prospect towards the Needles, and the low walls of Hurst Castle at the point of its long spit. Hereabouts is the proposed line of a Solent Tunnel which as yet remains in the air, but as _fait accompli_ might lift poor Yarmouth’s head, or Totland Bay’s, to the height of proud Ryde.

Simple as it stands now, Yarmouth is one of the Island’s three ancient boroughs, old enough to have been more than once burned by French excursionists in the bad old days, and a place of comparatively more importance a century ago, when fleets of sails might be wind-bound here for weeks. As bulwark against French and other attacks, a castle was built at the mouth of the Yar, whose remains are now enclosed in the grounds of the Pier Hotel, itself still recalling its state when it was the mansion of Sir Robert Holmes, and entertained Charles II. Else, Yarmouth has not much to boast in the way of architecture, unless some quaint old houses, refreshing after the modernity of Totland Bay. The Church, dating from James I., shows a collection of Holmes’ monuments, chief among them a fine statue of Sir Robert Holmes, which had a curious history: it is

said to have been meant for Louis XIV., but being captured at sea along with the sculptor, he was forced to fit it with a head of Sir Robert. This local worthy, Governor of the Island under Charles II., and a benefactor to the town by embanking its marshy estuary, had a wider renown as one of our early Nelsons; he is repeatedly mentioned in Pepys’ _Diary_, and his epitaph tells in sounding Latin how, among other exploits, he more than once beat the Dutch, not always beaten at sea by Charles’ sailors, how he took from them the colony of _Nova Belgia_, now better known as New York, and how he captured a cargo of Guinea gold that was coined into a word of much credit in our language.

The Island boasts at least one other sailor as having earned a place in our story. There was a poor tailor’s apprentice of Bonchurch who, according to the legend, ran away to the king’s navy, proved himself in his first fight worth more than nine men, and rose to be Admiral Sir Thomas Hopson, knighted by Queen Anne for breaking the boom at Vigo. These rough coasts have all along nursed a breed of stout sea-dogs, not always so well employed as in fighting the battles of their country. A century ago Yarmouth, and indeed all this corner, seems to have been a nest of amphibian waiters on the tides of fortune, passing as fishermen plain, but often coloured as smugglers, and proving excellent food for powder when they could be pressed into the navy blue.

Such proof spirits made boon companions for the eccentric painter George Morland, when in 1799 he fled from London to escape bailiffs. He had thus nearly jumped from the frying-pan into the fire, since at Yarmouth he and his brother were arrested by a party of the Dorset militia on suspicion of being spies for the French--why else should strangers be sketching the coast? At Shanklin, the same suspicion fell upon another artist, whom the fishermen began to pelt from his easel, but he, being a very fat man, cleared himself by patting his paunch, and exclaiming, “Does this look like anything French?” There was a spy-fever all over the Island at that time. In Morland’s case, amid the hoots of a patriotic populace, the military Dogberries marched off their prisoners to Newport, where they were discharged by the magistrates only on condition of making no more sketches. In spite of such prohibition, some of Morland’s best work represents the Freshwater cliffs and the fishing folk of this coast.

Yarmouth gives itself few seaside airs; yet one has seen bathing-places with no more to build on. There is a stretch of sand where a few bathing-machines are unlimbered; and at low tide the smell of seaweed and salt mud might be considered medicinal. The Pier Hotel (the ex-“George”) has recently enlarged itself to invite custom; and on the other side of the pier the Solent Yacht Club makes a showy patch upon a general aspect of well-worn old-fashionedness. If one yearn for a thicker mixture of up-to-date buildings, one has only to take the two or three miles’ walk, or few minutes’ railway run to Freshwater.

To the east, the Bouldnor estate has been trying to blossom into a red brick resort upon its wooded shore fringed with sand. By the low cliffs on this side we pass on towards the Hamstead Ledges, mines of fossils wealth, which I have heard a British Association President declare to be the most interesting part of the Island; but the general public takes quite an opposite view. The northern shore, with its muddy flats and crumbling banks, has no attraction for the many, till the sands of Gurnard Bay bring us round to the far stretched esplanade of Cowes.

Behind the coast, Parkhurst Forest once extended from Yarmouth to Cowes, where the country is still dotted with its fragments in woods, copses, and straggling hedgerows. Here, between the Downs and the Solent, runs the railway to Newport, keeping well back in the green plain, with more apparent regard for economy of line than for the convenience of the villages it serves on either hand. Its course, indeed, is soon turned inland by the Newton River, whose crops are raised from salterns and oyster-beds, across which the railway gets glimpses of the sea two or three miles away.

Among the branching creeks of this shallow inlet may be sought out Newton, now a mere hamlet, but, in the teeth of its name, boasting itself the oldest borough in the Island, which till not so long ago returned two members of Parliament, among them such celebrities as Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and George Canning. Though the place has a tiny, tumbledown Town Hall, it was only in the last century that it got a church of its own. But its now larger neighbour Shalfleet, nearer the railway, has one of the most notable churches on the Island, with a massive Norman tower and other relics, such as the rude carving over the north door, the subject of which makes a riddle for antiquaries.

On the opposite side of the line, the pretty village of Calbourne shows another old church, a good deal “restored,” to the scandalising of architectural purists; and near it Swainston is one of the most dignified Wight mansions, incorporating the remains of what was once an episcopal palace of the Winchester diocese. One Rector of Calbourne was that Nicholas Udall, now remembered as author of _Ralph Roister Doister_, the first English comedy, but as Headmaster of Eton noted in his own day for out-Heroding the Tudor Herods in school discipline, if Thomas Tusser’s experience were not exceptional--whose works the irony of time puts on library shelves beside those of his old tyrant--

From Paul’s I went, to Eton sent,
To learn straightways the Latin phrase,
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had;
For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to pass, thus beat I was.
See, Udall, see, the mercy of thee
To me, poor lad!

The Eton boys who painfully learned to act this Orbilius’ comedy, may often have been as sad over it as is the traditional clown in private life. If any of them grew up to be dramatic critics, they might have found some satisfaction in “slating” their ex-master. To us indeed the humours of this farcical piece suggest that our forefathers must have been as easily amused as were Mr Peter Magnus’ friends, to Mr Pickwick’s thinking. But also a play evidently modelled upon Plautus and Terence, with more than a hint of our old friend _Miles Gloriosus_, is remarkable for keeping in view a motto much neglected by many playwrights, _Maxima debetur puero reverentia_, while indeed it condescends to rough vernacular fun such as might not be expected from that strict disciplinarian, who, after retirement to a country parsonage, ended his days in another mastership at Westminster.

Calbourne one understands to be the “Malbourne” of a novel that made some noise, _The Silence of Dean Maitland_, where this countryside and its people are gauzily veiled under such names as “_Old_port” with its “_Burton’s_ Hotel,” and the “_Swaynestone_” lords of the manor; while other scenes of this moving story seem better masked as “Chalkbourne” and “Belminster.” One rather wonders that novelists think it needful to affect such a thin disguise. In another good story of the Isle of Wight, Mrs Oliphant’s _Old Mr Tredgold_, we find the same trick of nomenclature used rather more carelessly, when “Steephill” stands inland from “Sliplin,” and the “_Bunbridge_ cliffs” once betray themselves as Bembridge by a slip of the author’s pen, or of the printer’s eye. We plodding writers of fact are fain to grudge our fanciful brethren such half measures in reality. We would not drive them back upon “the pleasant town of A----” or “the ancient city of B----,” all the letters of the alphabet having long ago been used up in this service; but they might be at a little pain of invention to christen their “St Oggs” and “Claverings”; or at least let them be consistent, and not dump down Portsmouth by its honest name, as that first mentioned novelist does, among her ineffectual _aliases_.

Ground so well trodden by honeymooning couples seems to offer a fit stage for fiction; and the Isle of Wight, if it sometimes finds itself called out of its proper names, has less cause to complain of want of appreciation among the novelists who deal with it. Jane Austen only sights it from the walls of Portsmouth, but her interest was in human rather than natural features; and she at least compliments it with its local title “the Island.” Mr Meredith coasts or touches its shores here and there, taking such snapshots as:--“The Solent ran up green waves before a full-blowing South-wester. Gay little yachts bounded out like foam, and flashed their sails, light as sea nymphs. A cloud of deep summer blue topped the flying mountains of cloud.” Mr Zangwill pushes inland, and writes this testimonial:--“A maze of loveliness, abounding in tempting perspectives. Every leafy avenue is rich in promise; such nestling farmhouses, such peeping spires, such quaint red tiled cottages, such picturesque old-fashioned mullioned windows, such delicious wafts of perfume from the gardens and orchards, such bits of beautiful old England as are perhaps nowhere else so profusely scattered!” But another popular novelist, who shall here be nameless, playing _Advocatus Diaboli_ through the mouth of one of his characters in a perverse humour, puts the seamy side thus:--“That the Isle of Wight was only a trumpery toyshop, that its ‘scenery’ was fitly adorned with bazaars for the sale of sham jewellery, that its amusements were on a par with those of Rosherville Gardens; that its rocks were made of mud and its sea of powdered lime.”

This does not exhaust the catalogue of stories which have their scene here. Professor Church’s _Count of the Saxon Shore_ and Mr F. Cowper’s _Captain of the Wight_ come rather into the category of boys’ books, the latter being specially well stuffed with swashing blows and strong “language of the period.” Mr Headon Hill’s _Spies of the Wight_ gives a lurid peep into the machinations of a foreign power against our coast defences, and the tricks of a Fosco-like villain foiled by one of those Sherlock Holmes intellects that find it so easy to discover what has been invented for discovery. We are now approaching the most fashionable resort in the Island, and there perhaps may come across some of those scandals and sins of society that give a popular relish to so much of our circulating literature. Meanwhile, since there is nothing like seeing ourselves as others see us, for a careful picture of Isle of Wight life, let us turn to a French story-teller whose modesty might prefer his name to be withheld.

A collection of novelettes entitled _Amours Anglais_, one of which centres in the Island, is put forth by this writer as an essay in a new school of romance. His preface, dated from “Margate, Isle of Thanet,” lets us understand how after long years of sojourn in England he has observed John Bull as closely and profoundly as is possible for a stranger to do, and that he proposes to present English life to his countrymen, stripped of the ridiculous exterior with which it is charged by their caricaturing spirit. This sympathising stranger knows the British soul to be not less interesting and more wholesome than the gloomy and flabby Russian sentiment that has had such a vogue in French fiction. To the facts of _Outre-Manche_, then, he will apply his native “psychologic methods,” writing as a Frenchman what he has felt as an Englishman. His aim is “to create an international _genre_ of romance, marrying our taste to the humour and the morality of our neighbours. Have I succeeded? The public will judge.” So, with the best intentions, our _entente cordialiste_ appeals to his French readers. Let the English public now judge.

The heroine of this story is Lilian North, nearly out of her teens, whose home is a cottage wreathed with ivy and honeysuckle in the outskirts of Newport. Her father, who “says the service in the chapel” across the road, is “in orders,” not indeed Anglican orders, he being a fanatical Baptist who holds that “one is surer of going to hell with the Archbishop of Canterbury than with the Pope of Rome himself.” Her mother is dead. She has a married sister not far off at Plymouth--in which, for once, the author makes a slip, as he evidently means Portsmouth. Poor Lilian sees almost no society, except Jedediah, “papa’s disciple,” a sort of apprentice minister who “is to read the service when papa dies.” This young colleague and successor loves Lilian, with her father’s approval; but she loves him not, as how should she when he has red eyes, hair of no particular colour, and can talk about nothing but going to heaven!

Jedediah looks like turning out the hypocritical villain of the piece. Lilian likes him less than ever when the hero appears in the person of Harry Gordon, a young city clerk who has come courting Miss Arabella Jones, elder daughter of the Baptist minister at Newport. Mr Jones has the advantage of his colleague in being a rich man who “preaches only for his amusement”; and his daughters lead a rackety life that must have scandalised the connection, especially in the Ryde yachting season, when they are always at some party of pleasure, “sometimes in a boat, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in _char-à-bancs_, never knowing in the morning where they shall lunch in the afternoon, nor where and with whom they shall dance in the evening”; and when they visit Newport it is with a train of ever fresh cavaliers.

At a picnic in the ruins of Carisbrooke, Lilian makes the acquaintance of Harry Gordon, whom her friend Arabella Jones professes to disdain as a shy awkward boy. But Lilian takes to him, and Harry begins to pay more attention to her than to the proud Miss Jones. At a game of blindman’s buff among the ruins, the blindfolded hero is more deliberate than need be in pawing over Lilian’s face and figure before giving her name. Cupid catches them both.

Another day there was a party to Freshwater, where the sea is always _méchant_, even in fine weather. The ladies having ventured out in a boat, found themselves in such danger that they were glad to get on shore. Then Arabella put her backward swain to the test with the question--“if we had gone down, which of us would you have saved first?” Harry did not answer, but his looks were on Lilian, to the spiteful displeasure of Miss Jones. So, in talking of a ball about to be given by the wealthy Baptist pastor of Ryde, she scornfully bid Lilian come to it only if properly dressed--“none of your shabby dyed frocks and halfpenny flowers!”

Lilian’s cheeks glowed with shame under this insult, and she took the first opportunity of stealing away to weep all alone by moonlight. But Harry, indignantly sympathetic, had followed her, guided by her sobs. In vain she bid him return to his Arabella. Arabella indeed! He had never much cared for Miss Jones, whom he now detested after such an exhibition of ill-natured rudeness. As they strolled on the Freshwater esplanade, Lilian’s foot slipped; and Harry, holding-her up, took the opportunity to clasp the heroine in his arms. They went back an engaged couple--_cela va sans dire_.

The courtship had to be done on the sly; yet the young couple must have attracted suspicion in any more censorious neighbourhood, such as that not far away, which we hear of, on good authority, as bubbling over with “gossip, scandal, and spite.” Every day Harry rode from Ryde to Newport, met at her garden-gate by Lilian, to keep company with all the freedom of a British maiden and of an innocent heart. “I gave sugar to his horse, which was called Fly; we picked flowers, and ran races against each other.” Only the jealous Jedediah guessed what was going on. When Harry entered the house, he feigned great attention to the religious exhortations of the father, but could not make way in his good-will, while Jedediah scowled at every sight of his rival, whose ring Lilian wore “hidden under my mitten,” yet not perhaps from that green-spectacled monster.

Autumn broke up the gay non-conformist society of the Island. The Misses Jones went off to make fresh conquests at Brighton. Harry had to go back to his London office, but every week-end he took a bed at the “Bugle” Hotel of Newport, spent Sunday with his _fiancée’s_ family, and returned to business by the last train. In spite of this breaking of the Sabbath, the Baptist minister believed that the young man came all the way from London to hear him preach. But at last the neighbours began to talk; so the lovers saw themselves obliged to meet only in secret, and to pour out their hearts in long letters. The worst of it was that Harry grew cross and impatient. His father, a rich shipowner at Cardiff, would never consent to his engagement with the daughter of a poor Baptist preacher. If he knew, he would cut his son off with a shilling, “as the law authorises him to do.” The Rev. Mr North, for his part, would frown on his child’s union with a family far from sound in faith. Lilian was for a long engagement, in hopes that the old people would come round. Harry’s more heroic remedy was an immediate secret marriage such as, in tale and history, has sooner or later the effect of forcing parents to make the best of a bad business. The wooer becomes ill-temperedly pressing; Lilian at length consents; but when these unpractical youngsters lay their heads together, they run up at once against the serious difficulty of finding a minister to marry them. Then the heroine takes the desperate resolution of throwing herself upon the generosity of her unsuccessful suitor. She leads Jedediah into the garden; and now for a scene in the best style of French fiction.

“Do you love me, Mr Jedediah?” I said.

The poor fellow had a moment of joy and hope.

“I ask if you love me well enough to wish my happiness, even if
that should cause you pain?”

“Yes,” said he, all at once overcast again.

“And do you feel yourself capable of doing all you can to aid the
accomplishment of what will be grievous to you?”

“Perhaps,” replied Jedediah with a sigh.

“Mr Jedediah, I love Harry Gordon.”

“I feared so!”

“I wish to marry him.”

“And you reckon on me to win the consent of Mr North. But nothing
will move him, Miss Lilian: he has discovered that Mr Harry’s
father is a Puseyite, and his aunt a nun in Ireland. His conviction
is that Mr Harry is a treacherous foe who has got into intimacy
with him for the purpose of stealing his papers and spying upon his
conduct. Nothing will move him!”

“I am aware of it, so I have made up my mind to marry without his
knowledge.”

“Without his knowledge! But who will marry you?”

“You, Mr Jedediah!”

“Me!”

“Yourself, my good, my dear Jedediah!”

“But,” went on Jedediah, after a moment’s consideration, “even if I
were weak enough to consent to so culpable an action, such a union
would not be valid in the eye of the law. Not being a member of the
Established Church, I cannot celebrate a civil marriage. You must
go before the Registrar; and, as you are both under age, this
official will not marry you without your father’s authorisation in
writing.”

“Alas! what are we to do?”

Jedediah reflected.

“What would you say if I undertook to get this authorisation for
you?”

“I should say that you are our good angel.”

“Then, let me manage.”

I held out my hand and he kissed it. His glasses were moist with
tears.

Three days later, he brought me the document which I required. He
was very pale. I would have asked questions, but he let me
understand that he would not answer. “I have done wrong for your
sake, Miss Lilian,” he said.

I learned afterwards that he had procured my father’s _blanc-seing_
under pretext of a petition addressed to the Government against the
Ritualists, and especially against the use of surplices, baldaquins
over altars, and confessionals.

I do not know to what stratagems Harry had recourse for obtaining
the necessary papers. What is certain is that we were married on
Easter Tuesday, before the Registrar of the county, after which
Jedediah gave us the nuptial benediction in a little chapel of the
Baptist communion situated in the environs of Plymouth
(_Portsmouth_). He married us without looking at us. I have never
seen a scene more strange, nor a man more unfortunate.

He refused to come and share the wedding-cake with us, which we ate
at my sister’s.

But those English love-marriages between rash young people by no mean always end in living happily all the rest of their days; and the story soon turns tragic, its scene shifting from the Island. After that secret wedding, Harry returns to London, leaving his wife in an awkward position, where Jedediah is her only comfort. Love still blinds her eyes to the selfishness of Harry; but the reader sees how she might have been better off with poor Jedediah, who is not such a villain after all, but only the Dobbin or Seth Bede of the tale. The time comes when her marriage can no longer be hidden. Harry takes lodgings for her in London at the house of a Mrs Benson, whose husband, being employed at the Bricklayers’ Arms Goods Station, finds it convenient to live in a four-roomed house in Shoreditch, too large for a quiet couple.

To this sympathetic landlady, Lilian relates the foregoing story, with many tears and gulps of _tisane_, a refreshment, it seems, known to Shoreditch sickbeds. Her child is born dead. The young mother in her feverish weakness fancies that Jedediah has revengefully contrived some defect in the ceremony, and cries out to have her marriage made legally complete at the parish church. Harry, moved by her delirium, writes to both parents, confessing the truth. A curate is sent for, who politely but hastily says a few prayers at the sick-bed, then hurries off to a tea-party at the West-end. Lilian dies the same night. Harry weeps, to be sure, but soon grows tired of sitting up with the dead, and comes down to smoke a pipe with the landlord.

Next day Gordon _père_ arrives in a great rage, but, at the sight of his dead daughter-in-law, he is touched to the point of taking off his hat, as English gentlemen, it appears, will do on such special occasions. Mr North, on his arrival, shows natural grief, which is soon turned to wrath by the sight of a crucifix laid on his daughter’s breast, contrary to “the statute of the fifteenth year of Elizabeth,” as he knows well; and he gives up all hope of her eternal welfare, on hearing how her last moments had been corrupted by the prayers of an Anglican priest. Mrs Benson, who takes that wide view of religion spread in France by such divines as the Savoyard Vicar and such poets as Beranger, in vain tries to comfort him.

“What! Is she lost for such a small matter? The curate did not stay ten minutes. I know nothing about any of your sects; but I am sure that there is only one _bon Dieu_ for all of us; and Benson thinks so too.”

Jedediah’s grief is not less deep but more reasonable. It is he who performs the service when, on a snowy evening, Lilian is buried in Bethnal Green Cemetery.

But the sensational story has a cynical epilogue. Kind Mrs Benson, _qui sent son Dickens_, never forgets her young lodger. One Sunday, as her husband is reading _Lloyd’s News_, which he spells out conscientiously from the “_premier Londres_ of M. Jerrold to the last line of the advertisements,” he exclaims at a paragraph stating that a clergyman, named North, formerly of the Isle of Wight, had been caught trying to break images over the altar of Exeter Cathedral, and sent to an asylum as a madman. Nothing is heard of Jedediah, and we can only trust that he duly succeeded to the Newport pastorate and found some consoling helpmeet in the congregation. Of Harry there is no news till some years later, when the Bensons go to Cardiff to meet a married daughter returning from New Zealand. Calling at the Gordons’ house, they learn that the father is dead, and that Harry, now his own master, is about to marry a Miss Jones of Ryde, not indeed the proud Arabella, but her younger sister Florence, to whom time has transferred his facile affections.

The last scene introduces Miss Florence going over the house soon to be her own, and finding in a drawer an old black glove torn and soiled. Harry denies all knowledge of it, but when his new beloved proposes to throw it away, he shows that it has some value for him. The suspicious damsel sulks, plays off on his jealousy a cousin in the Scots Greys, refuses to waltz with her _fiancé_, except at the price of his giving up that glove. He sighs as a widower, but obeys as a wooer. Giving one secret kiss to poor Lilian’s glove, he resigns it to the triumphant Miss Jones, who flings it on the fire, and holds out her white fingers for the forgiven Harry to kiss, yet not without a smiling stab at that unknown rival’s memory--“Her hand was larger than mine!”

Now for the moral of this realistic romance. “Let him who has never committed a cowardice of the kind, who has never sacrificed a memory to a hope, the forgotten love to the fresh one, the dead to the living, let him cast at Harry the first stone!” To which poor Jedediah will not say _Amen_.

The latest scene for fiction set in the Isle of Wight--_All Moonshine_, by Richard Whiteing--is no photograph of actual society like that just reduced, but a most imaginative romance, not to say a wild nightmare inspired by the dangers of over-population, and based on the statistical claim quoted in my first chapter, that the world’s eighteen hundred millions or so could all find room to meet in this Island. The author, falling asleep at Ventnor, dreams of such a universal rendezvous as coming about in the form of astral bodies from all ends of the earth, when some very strange things happen among the unsubstantial multitude. At one moment it seems as if the ghostly armies of England and Germany were about to close here in a lurid Armageddon; but they are fain to fraternise before the general peril of an earthquake announced at Shide as threatening to crack the globe and overwhelm civilisation in waves of fire let loose from hell. The dreamer awakes to find the world what it is, with nations and classes seeking to fatten on their neighbours’ poverty, kings and statesmen watching each other’s armaments in mutual suspicion, priests hoisting flags on their churches in exultation over the slaughter of fellow-Christians, and only an unpractical poet or romancer to cry here and there--

Ah! when shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,
Thro’ all the circle of the golden year.

COWES

We now come to one of the most important places in the Island, a place that holds up its double head for second to none in the way of dignity and fashion, though it began life as two small castles built by Henry VIII. at the Medina’s mouth to protect the harbour of Newport.

The two great Cows that in loud thunder roar,
This on the eastern, that the western shore,
Where Newport enters stately Wight.

“I knew when there was not above three or four houses at Cowes,” says Sir John Oglander, who yet had counted three hundred ships at anchor there; “and I was and am persuaded that if our wars and troubles had not unfortunately happened, it would have grown as famous as Newport.” Another scourge of the Island in his time was the activity of lawyers to stir up strife, whereas the first attorney who ventured himself here had been ignominiously charivaried out of this Arcadian scene by order of the Governor. But it might be, he admits, that lawyers were no more to blame than the absence of ships of war, once such good customers for the Islanders’ produce. “Now peace and law hath beggared us all, so that within my memory many of the gentlemen and almost all the yeomanry are undone.” One observes the distinction drawn by this rule of thumb economist between the ruinous effects of civil war and the profitable accidents of helping to ruin another country.