Soon after the beginning of this century there began to be noticed signs of a reaction against the poet Tennyson, and, indeed against most of the great Victorian writers and the age they made glorious. Those of us who then kept loyal to the wonderful company of the 19th century masters, and kept true to our first love, have of late rejoiced to mark signs of a change on the literary horizon which foretells an almost complete reversal to the old appreciation of Tennyson, as of much else belonging to the Victorian age, of which he was one of the brightest lights. The critics used to write about a Victorian style, but I think we are not justified in using such a term, for never was there such variety, so many brilliant constellations of stars of the first magnitude, but differing from one another in glory. The mention of a few names should be sufficient to show that never was such profusion and coruscation of shining excellencies as in that age. In fiction there are Dickens and Thackeray, in poetry Tennyson and Browning, in other departments of literature there are Carlyle and Ruskin. Surely it is only the very prejudiced and undiscerning who will pronounce the Victorian age something to be scoffed at and satirized.

Before 1890, when I was a young man not much more than twenty, I was a convinced and delighted devotee of Tennyson, having been initiated into the beautiful temple of his art by my father. My devotion was strengthened and confirmed when I went to live and work at Freshwater, close to Farringford, the poet's home with it's pleasant, almost park-like grounds and gardens.

Periodically my work obliged me to visit some of the larger houses in the neighbourhood, including Farringford, and then, and at other times. I frequently met, and sometimes conversed with the poet. Some people named Brookfield who were, I think, in their way, famous, lived near by. They were friends of Tennyson's and friends also of the family I was staying with. I became acquainted with these gifted and cultured people and gathered from them facts and stories about the poet. These combined with my own personal experiences will help form the matter of the remainder of this brief account.

The beginning of my contacts with the famous writer was in this wise. My firt visit to Farringord took place in late May. Roses were budding, some buds had even opened in the long borders between the lane and the house. Tulips, not yet over, in glowing clusters stretched their swan-like necks towards the sun, while the thorn-trees at the back of the garden were arrayed in their perfumed white garments. The old poet had been ill, and I saw him a few yards away, seated in a well-cushioned chair in a clematis-wreathed summer-house open to the south. His wife, a white-haired placid old lady sat at his side. They were looking away to the deep blue sea which could be seen where long lines of chalk-downs dipped to the bay.

One of these cliffs, about 400 feet high, was in those days marked by a wooden beacon, latterly to be replaced by a granite memorial of the poet. He had named this cliff Teliessin - The Splendid Brow.

I slowed down my walk while passing the summer-house and tried, unpercieved, to have a good look at the famous man. He seemed to be dreaming, with eyes wide open. Was his dream about putting forth to sea, another more mysterious sea than that he appeared to be looking at so steadfastly? Paper was near his hand, and I like to think that he had been writing a poem, even that lovely little song called 'Crossing the Bar.'

I could not linger and passed on to the house to my work there. Some day afterwards the Brookfields visited us, and told us that Tennyson had recently written what they thought was a gem of a poem called 'Crossing the Bar'. So it may have been written just before I had seen him when he may have been dreaming of a bluer sea than that before his bodily eyes. Mrs Brookfield said that he had read, or rather, chanted the verses to her, with much emotion. Like George Macdonald, he believed in chanting poetry, rather than speaking it in a natural way. Mrs Brookfield told us that the poet's words after chanting his poem were
"I've made rather a long stay ashore this time - not many exciting adventures have come to me - I shall get them I suppose when I put out to sea again - Ah, soon! Mine has been a quiet uneventful life, - I have been a talker, a spinner of yarns, a poor doer!"
"A sweet singer!" she said.
He replied "Too often an idle singer of silly, futile things, a singer paid by fools to flatter them."
"You might not have been 'My Lord' otherwise!" remarked Mrs Brookfield.
Lady Tennyson, sitting near, smiled but remained silent, but the poet continued. "An empty childish honour! I wish now that I had chosen to voice the inarticulate longings, hopes and fears, loves and hates of common folk. Better still, to have become one of them!"
"Well," said Mrs. Brookfield, "At any rate you have been yourself, and have not been beholden to anyone for the living water! You have gone direct to the Spring."
"May be!" replied Tennyson, "But it is a very risky matter. The whole tribe of water-carriers, old and new, combine to crush the original soul. I hear them crying - 'A dangerous lunatic! What! Draw water for himself! Rascal! Scoundrel! Villain! Unparallelled audacity! Unheard of infamy! Unbridled depravity. Unexampled turpitude!"
So they parted.

Since then I have frequently read 'Crossing the Bar', the little poem that had started the conversation with the Brookfields, and soon was able to see that the poet thought that the end of this life is not the end of the voyage, as he himself implied in his talk with his friends, not the return to harbour, but is in reality the beginning, or maybe, the resumption of the Ocean Voyage. I did not hear him read or recite 'Crossing the Bar,' but on several occasions heard him repeat his own verse. Nearly always he was greatly moved by the beautiful words, and I think that he had no idea, while reading them that they were his own, at least for the time being they were practically not his own. He was, I believe, in this matter without conceit when he expressed admiration of his own poems. I have heard him say about the little lyric mentioned above, that it assumed that our earthly life is but a brief call at an island or port. This life he thought of as but an interlude of many in the infinite journeying. Did he imagine adventures in that voyage like those encountered while on shore - strange meetings and happenings, storms and calms - and how much more?

Often I saw him afterwards, walking in the lanes near his house. The once tall and straight body stooping, dressed in a long black cloak and crowned with a wide-brimmed felt hat of the same sombre hue. I overtook him one day when I was on my way to Alum Bay to visit an old fisherman with whom I had made acquaintance. Walker, was his name, and I had soon become aware that he was no common old man. Tennyson thought so too, and went to see him now and then. The poet and I were by then on speaking terms and, after our meeting, we went on together along the valley road, 'close to the ridge of a noble down', to use the poet's own words. In our walk he told me a little about the fisherman.

"He belonged" said he, "to a remarkable family of sea-faring folk". Somewhat condensed, Tennyson's account is recalled by me now like this. Walker's elder brother painted the beautiful things he saw everywhere, but the younger, whose love of nature was perhaps greater even than his brother's was inarticulate. Helped by the Squire, the elder had gone to London, where after training at an Art School, he had set up as a professional painter. Tennyson laughed when he told of the wonder and admiration of the simple fisherfolk at the way the painter could paint a portrait in oils with his thumb only. "But of course," he went on, "There is nothing really wonderful about that. I think that his son is a still greater artist, and of national reputation."

So talking we arrived at the cottage at Alum Bay. In the little sitting-room there was a shelf of books and a couple of the brother's pictures. The whole house had a fishy smell, betraying its owner's occupation. The poet was weary when we arrived, and rested, making himself acquainted with some of the books and the pictures, while I went with the fisherman to examine a remarkable cave he wished me to see. We were away for only a few minutes and on re-entering the house we saw that the poets eyes were closed. In vain we tried to attract his attention. I felt that it was not natural sleep that held him.
"He is in a trance," said Walker, "and probably wider awake than we are. I wish I could see what he is seeing now!"

I had heard of these trances of the poet. There was nothing for it but to wait patiently.
"It may last half-an-hour," said old Walker.
In about twenty minutes the closed eyes slowly opened and, seeing us, he said what I then hardly understood. Perhaps Walker knew what he referred to.
"I have been there again," he said, "to the place of Light, right unto the Light itself. Very dark it is here now!"
"I make bold to say, My Lord, that the Light is still here, and is always with you!" said the fisherman.
The poet sighed heavily, and did not speak for several minutes, and we soon left the old man and took our way back in the golden evening light. Tennyson called at the house of Squire Ward who lived about a mile away, and I returned alone to Freshwater Gate.

I was able to form what I considered a fairly correct estimate of Tennyson's character from what the Brookfields and others said about him, as well as from my own observation, especially when one of the village people was arrested and eventually imprisoned for what the neighbours regarded as a very slight deviation from the course laid down by the Law of the Land. Much indignation and sympathy were aroused in the neighbourhood. Mr. Brookfield told us that Tennyson's comment was that 'Fools always have to suffer sooner or later before they learn wisdom.'

Mrs. Brookfield, who sometimes spoke rather caustically, replied, he said, 'They suffer more than enough without their fellow-fools, bigger fools still, interfering!"
"True!" said the poet, "to be a fool is in itself punishment enough. And the bigger fools, as you quite rightly describe them, who imagine they are protecting society - they mean themselves - by senseless cruelty, have to suffer many things as well as the misfortune of being the big fools they are."
To which Mr. Brookfield replied. You are quite right. And what a mistake it is to send one who kicks over the traces a little, to prison, where most likely he will become obsessed with the hideous side of things, and forget the friendly aspect that is at least as plainly evident as the other."
"I am with you in all you say" said Tennyson. "Most of us ignore one or the other side of Nature. Like Luther's drunken peasant on his donkey, lurching first to one side, then to the other, never able to sit evenly on the saddle, we are for ever leaning one way or another. I have proved it in my own writings again and again. For instance, 'Nature red in tooth and claw' - that shows a most one-sided tendency!" Mrs. Brookfield interrupted him to say. "That is just what the poor fellow will have forced upon him in the prison. Only it is human nature that will loom red before him."

On another occasion, the subject discussed was that same human nature. There were several friends present - so the Brookfields told me - and one of them uttered the always foolish words 'Human nature being what it is" - "so and so, and so and so!" "I", said Mrs. Brookfield, asked, well, and what is human nature?" More than one of those present seemed to think it was an incorrigibly evil thing - always the same.
"Excuse me!" said the poet. "It is never the same! it is the most fluid theng in the universe, always changing ----
"But always," one friend broke in, "Always intrinsically the same evil thing. Like a river, here noisy, there calm, here brown and muddy, there blue and heaven-mirroring, but always H2O."
Tennyson replied, "That is not the best simile, that of the river, I think human nature is a growing, developing thing, with an almost infinite range from soot to diamond, from clay to rubies, from Nero to Christ."
And they left it at that.

In spite of the fact that the poet bore, and indeed, still bears long after the end of his sojourn upon earth, the reputation of studied boorishness and aloofness, I found him very generous and human. True he did not suffer fools gladly sometimes. And to curious and often discourteous tourists and other bores he showed his rough side. On one occasion when I was passing him and a friend on my way to the house I heard him cry out, "Damn it! There's one of those peeping Toms I'm pestered with! Jane! ---" calling a maid who was picking roses a few yards away - "Jane! Go and tell that - fellow he is intruding!"
To the friend standing with him I heard him say. "Pardon me! I am persecuted past belief or endurance by those idiots!"

Then I passed beyond hearing, but could not help thinking that he should not have been so greatly upset by these well-meaning hero-worshippers. Of course it was very annoying when sometimes they broke hedges, wrecked shrubs and trampled flowers in their eagerness to get a glimpse of the famous man. I have been told by some who knew him well, far better than I did, that in his heart he greatly loved to be worshipped. That is quite likely, for he was only human after all.

Let me tell of another instance of the poet's reaction, reaching sometimes to fury, to what he regarded as persecution by admiring tourists. Towards the end of my stay at Freshwater I was asked to visit the Tennyson's as a friend. The poet had discovered that I, too, wrote verses. Some of mine had appeared in a local newspaper. The old Master Singer was good enough to offer his advice to a beginner.
"I wish I could help you more," he assured me soon after we had settled ourselves for talk. "I am a very old man now, and all I want is rest. Once I might have taken seriously the work of helping young writers. All I want now is peace, but

His eyes closed. A servant entered and announced that a visitor had called who said he had come all the way from Tennessee to see him, and would Lord Tennyson give him half-an-hour? She handed a card to her mistress. On it were the words

The Poet's eyes flashed, he siezed the card and tore it into little pieces and cried in wrath "Tell him to go all the way to --- Blazes!"

The servant departed and I know not how she got rid of the enthusiastic visitor. We saw nothing of him and Tennyson presently resumed his talk about how to set about making verses. Among other things he said. "Keep a little note-book in your pocket, and jot down any musical word or line, any thought that suggests a poem to you. Many of my songs sprang as it were from a nucleus of maybe just one word, or melodious phrase, which arose in my brain unbidden from, from - well, who knows where? And believe me, if you want to write something worth while you must seize that word or phrase at once, and from it develop your lyric. From experience I know that if I do not begin to write on the instant, the poem that asked to be born never comes to birth. It is lost irrevocably. I am sure that I have missed writing many poems equal or superior to my best because I let my thoughts go cold. So keep your note-book well furnished, and take firm hold of the beautiful song before it can use its wings to fly back home to the world of the unborn music."

Later he said, "Don't be afraid to use words that other poets have used if they come alive and fresh to you. I was once accused of plagiarism because, forsooth I published the line "The moanings of the homeless sea". Said the clever critics, "Moanings" from Horace. "Homeless" from Shelley" - As if no one had heard the sea moan except Horace, or thought of the restless sea as 'homeless', except Shelley! The idiots! If I say 'The sun went down', they will at once accuse me of having got the idea from Homer or some other!"

On my way back to my lodgings I mused "How the poor old man loves his poetry and how he hates being made a little God of". I expect he has long ago realized that to be merely 'An idle singer', as he once called himself is, indeed, nothing to boast of."

So ended my hobnobbing with a poet who had the reputation of being misanthropical. Soon afterwards I left the Isle of Wight, and it was not long before I saw in the newspaper that the singer of four score years and more had left this life of dischord and strife. Maybe he has since discovered that he had been by no means 'an idle singer', but that his songs have filled and will go on filling many lives with beauty and many hearts with love. And now that the mists of earth have passed away for him, and he, perchance, has long since arrived at the place where Love and Beauty are the very atmosphere and every thought is music, he is no more called misanthropical by his fellow still human singers.