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THE HEART OF ENGLAND
THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES
This Series opens with a new work by Mr. EDWARD THOMAS, that curious
and enthusiastic explorer of the English Countryside, whose prose
style gives him a claim to be regarded as the successor, as he is the
biographer, of Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new edition
of Mr. THOMAS’S other work, “The Heart of England,” and Mr. HILAIRE
BELLOC’S “The Historic Thames.” These two volumes were originally
issued in limited editions at one Guinea net per volume.
=THE SOUTH COUNTRY.= By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. =3s. 6d.= net.
Mr. Thomas in this new book gives his impressions of a year’s
wanderings afoot as the seasons change through Kent, Sussex, Hampshire,
Wiltshire and Cornwall. It is a prose-poem of the most beautiful
counties in England.
THE HEART OF ENGLAND. By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. =3s. 6d.= net.
THE HISTORIC THAMES. By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P. =3s. 6d.= net.
_Prospectus of above Books sent post free on application._
J. M. DENT & CO.
29-30, BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
THE HEART OF
ENGLAND
_by Edward Thomas_
LONDON
_J. M. DENT & CO._
_1909_
]
_All rights reserved_
TO
HENRY W. NEVINSON
CONTENTS
PART I.
LEAVING TOWN
CHAP. PAGE
I. LEAVING TOWN 1
PART II
THE LOWLAND
II. FAUNUS 21
III. NOT HERE, O APOLLO! 26
IV. WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY 28
V. NO MAN’S GARDEN 31
VI. MARCH DOUBTS 37
VII. A DECORATED CHURCH 41
VIII. GARLAND DAY 44
IX. AN OLD WOOD 49
X. IN A FARMYARD 52
XI. MEADOWLAND 56
XII. AN OLD FARM 64
XIII. POPPIES 69
XIV. AUGUST 73
XV. OLD-FASHIONED TIMES 77
XVI. ONE GREEN FIELD 83
XVII. THE BROOK 88
XVIII. AN AUTUMN GARDEN 93
XIX. THE WALNUT TREE 97
XX. A GOLDEN AGE 100
XXI. THE VILLAGE 103
XXII. ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER 118
XXIII. THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING 121
XXIV. THE METAMORPHOSIS 124
XXV. EARTH CHILDREN 126
XXVI. NOVEMBER RAIN 138
XXVII. JANUARY SUNSHINE 140
XXVIII. THE BARGE 143
XXIX. A WINTER MORNING 146
PART III
THE UPLAND
XXX. CHERRY BLOSSOM 153
XXXI. THE FOX HUNT 155
XXXII. APPLE BLOSSOM 166
XXXIII. A LITTLE BEFORE HARVEST 170
XXXIV. AUTUMN BELLS 174
XXXV. SUNDAY 176
PART IV.
THE MOUNTAINS
XXXVI. THE FIRST DAFFODILS 183
XXXVII. THE MIRROR 192
XXXVIII. UNDER THE MOOR 198
XXXIX. A HARVEST MOON 202
XL. THE INN 205
PART V
THE SEA
XLI. A MARCH HAUL 211
XLII. FISHING BOATS 214
XLIII. CLOUDS OVER THE SEA 216
XLIV. THE MARSH 220
XLV. ONE SAIL AT SEA 223
XLVI. THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK 225
NOTE
Of the five songs printed at the end of this book, only “La Fille du
Roi” has been published before, I believe. “The Holm Bank Hunting Song”
and “Poor Old Horse” were sung by competitors for folk-song prizes
at the annual Westmoreland Musical Festival, and I owe them to the
kindness of Mr. George Rathbone. “The Mowing Song” and “Mary, come into
the Field,” were given to me by friends.
EDWARD THOMAS.
PART I
LEAVING TOWN
THE HEART OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
LEAVING TOWN
Sunday afternoon had perfected the silence of the suburban street.
Every one had gone into his house to tea; none had yet started for
church or promenade; the street was empty, except for a white pigeon
that pecked idly in the middle of the road and once leaned upon one
wing, raised the other so as to expose her tender side and took the
rain deliciously; so calm and unmolested was the hour.
The houses were in unbroken rows and arranged in pairs, of which one
had a bay window on the ground floor and one had not. Some had laurels
in front; some had names. But they were so much alike that the street
resembled a great storehouse where yards of goods, all of one pattern,
are exposed, all with that painful lack of character that makes us wish
to rescue one and take it away and wear it, and soil it, and humanise
it rapidly.
Soon a boy of nine years old came out of one house and stood at the
gate. At first he moved briskly and looked in every direction as if
expecting to see some one whom he knew; but in a little while he paused
and merely looked towards the pigeon, so fixedly that perhaps he
saw it not. The calm silenced him, took him into its bosom, yet also
depressed him. Had he dared, he would have shouted or run; he would
have welcomed the sound of a piano, of a dog barking, of a starling
coldly piping. While he still paused an old man rounded the corner of
the street and came down in the roadway towards him.
The old man was small and straight, and to his thin figure the remains
of a long black coat and grey trousers adhered with singular grace.
You could not say that he was well dressed, but rather that he was in
the penultimate stage of a transformation like Dryope’s or Daphne’s,
which his pale face had not altogether escaped. His neglected body
seemed to have grown this grey rind that flapped like birch bark. Had
he been born in it the clothing could not have been more apt. The eye
travelled from these clothes with perfect satisfaction--as from a
branch to its fruit--to his little crumpled face and its partial crust
of hair. Yet he walked. One hand on a stick, the other beneath a basket
of watercress, he walked with quick, short steps, now and then calling
out unexpectedly, as if in answer to a question, “Watercresses!” No one
interrupted him. He was hungry; he nibbled at pieces of cress with his
gums, and so kneaded his face as if it had been dough. He passed the
boy; he stooped, picked up a rotten apple, and in the act frightened
the pigeon, which rose, as the boy saw, and disappeared.
The boy raised his head and watched. He saw the old man--as in an
eloquent book and not with his own usually indolent eyes--and thought
him a traveller. Yes! that was how a traveller looked--a strange,
free man, hatless, walking in the road, ignoring puddles, talking
carelessly to himself; from the country--such was his stick and the
manner of his clothes; with something magnificent and comely in his
hoariness; sleeping the boy knew not where, perhaps not at all, but
going on and on, certainly not to church, but perhaps to places with
mountains, icebergs, houses in the branches of trees, great waters,
camels, monkeys, crocodiles, parrots, ivory, cannibals, curved swords.
And the boy flushed to think that the quiet street was an avenue to all
the East, the Pole, the Amazon ... to dark men who wondered about the
sunlight, the wind, the rain, and whence they came ... to towns set
down in the heart of forests and lonely as ships at sea. But whatever
he was, the old man was more blessed than any one whom the boy had ever
seen.
The old man was gone out of sight. The boy started to run and follow;
but he stumbled and fell and uttered his intolerable longing in a fit
of grave tears, while the street began to be bright and restless again.
I thought to follow him myself. But the next day I was still in that
grey land, looking at it from a railway train.
The hundreds of streets parallel or at angles with the railway--some
exposing flowery or neglected back gardens, bedrooms half seen through
open windows, pigeon houses with pigeons bowing or flashing in flight,
all manner of domesticities surprised--others a line of shop fronts
and gorgeous or neat or faded women going to and fro--others, again,
a small space that had been green and was still grassy under its
encumbrance of dead trees, scaffolding and bricks--some with inns
having good names--these streets are the strangest thing in the
world. They have never been discovered. They cannot be classified.
There is no tradition about them. Poets have not shown how we are to
regard them. They are to us as mountains were in the Middle Ages,
sublime, difficult, immense; and yet so new that we have inherited
no certain attitude towards them, of liking or dislike. They suggest
so much that they mean nothing at all. The eye strains at them as at
Russian characters which are known to stand for something beautiful
or terrible; but there is no translator: it sees a thousand things
which at the moment of seeing are significant, but they obliterate one
another. More than battlefield or library, they are dense with human
life. They are as multitudinous and painful and unsatisfying as the
stars. They propose themselves as a problem to the mind, only a little
less so at night when their surfaces hand the mind on to the analogies
of sea waves or large woods.
Nor at the end of my journey was the problem solved. It was a land of
new streets and half-built streets and devastated lanes. Ivied elm
trunks lay about with scaffold poles, uprooted shrubs were mingled with
bricks, mortar with turf, shining baths and sinks and rusty fire grates
with dead thistles and thorns. Here and there a man in a silk hat or a
little girl with neat ankles and high brown boots stepped amidst the
deeply rutted mud. An artist who wished to depict the Fall and some
sympathy with it in the face of a ruined Eden might have had little to
do but copy an acre of the surviving fields.
A north wind swept the land clean. In the hedges and standing trees,
it sobbed at intervals like a bitter child forcing himself to cry; in
the windowless houses it made a merrier sound like a horn. It drove
workmen and passers-by to spend as much time as possible in “The
King’s Head,” and there the medley of the land was repeated. Irish and
Cockney accents mingled with Kentish; Americans would have been out of
place. No one seemed to dislike the best room in the inn, where there
was a piano, a coloured picture of Lord Roberts and of the landlord
as a youth, an old print of snipe-shooting, some gaudy and fanciful
advertisements of spirits, and no fire to warm the wall-paper which had
once had a pattern characteristic of poor bathrooms.
I felt a kind of exalted and almost cheerful gloom as I stepped out and
saw that it was raining and would go on raining. O exultation of the
sorrowful heart when Nature also seems to be sorrowing! What strange
merriment is this which the dejected mind and the wind in the trees are
making together! What high lavolt of the shuffling heels of despair! As
two lovers wounded and derided will make of their complainings one true
joy that triumphs, so will the concealing rain and the painful mind.
The workmen had gone; faint lights began to appear through the blinds
of the finished houses. There was no sunset, no change from day to
night. The end of the day was like what is called a natural death in
bed; an ill-laid fire dies thus. With the darkness a strange spirit of
quiet joy appeared in the air. Old melodies floating about it on that
mourning wind. The rain formed a mist and a veil over the skeletons
round about, but it revealed more than it took away; Nature gained
courage in the gloom. The rain smoothed her as it will wash away
tears on the lonely hills. The trees were back in Eden again. They
were as before in their dim, stately companies. The bad walking was no
annoyance. Once I came upon a line of willows above dead reeds that
used to stand out by a pond as the first notice to one walking out of
London that he was in the country at last; they were unchanged; they
welcomed and encouraged once more. The lighted windows in the mist had
each a greeting; they were as the windows we strain our eyes for as
we descend to them from the hills of Wales or Kent; like those, they
had the art of seeming a magical encampment among the trees, brave,
cheerful lights which men and women kept going amidst the dense and
powerful darkness. The thin, incompleted walls learned a venerable
utterance.
The night grew darker. The sound of pianos mingled with the wind. I
could not see the trees--I was entrapped in a town where I had once
known nothing but fields and one old house, stately and reticent among
the limes. A sense of multitude surged about and over me--of multitudes
entirely unknown to me--collected by chance--mere numbers--human faces
that were at that moment expressing innumerable strange meanings with
which I had nothing to do. Had I said to one who entered an adjacent
house that I was retrospectively a lodger of his, since I had once
hidden for half a day in the hollow oak in his front garden, he would
have stared. Here were people living in no ancient way. That they
supped and slept in their houses was all that was clear to me. I
wondered why--why did they go on doing these things? Did they ever
sit up thinking and thinking, trying to explain to themselves why they
were there, and then fall asleep in their chairs and awake still with
the same goalless thought and so go shivering to bed? The window lights
were now as strange to me and as fascinating as, to a salmon swaying
by a bridge, the lights and faces of the poachers on the bank. As if
it were new came back to me the truism that most men are prisons to
themselves. Here was a city imprisoned deep, and I as deep, in the
rain. Was there, perhaps, joy somewhere on account of those thousands
of prisoners and lighted windows?
I left London that night on foot. By way of preparation, I stayed until
after midnight to listen to a sweet voice that drew upon all the gloom
and jangle of London the sweet patterns of some old country melodies.
Strange and pleasant it was to look out upon the London night of
angry-ridged, tumultuous roofs, and then, sharply drawing a curtain, to
live upon a cadence, a melody--
“As I walked forth one Midsummer morning
A-viewing the meadow and to take the air ...”
A pure rose upon a battlefield, a bright vermeil shell upon a
slatternly sea-shore after storm, would not be of a more piercing
beauty than those songs just there.
Then I set out and began to stain the immense silence of the city with
the noise of my heels and stick. A journalist or two went by; a fat
man and his fat dog straying from the neat bar of a Conservative Club
homewards without precipitancy; a few pleasure-seekers with bleared or
meditative eye; a youth with music in his steps, fresh from some long
evening of talk and song, perhaps his first. Here was a policeman
stern and expectant in a dark entry, or smoking a pipe; there stood or
sat or leaned or lay men and women who no more give up their secrets
than the blinded windows and the doors that will not be knocked at for
hours yet. How noble the long, well-lighted streets at this hour, fit
with their smooth paved ways for some roaring game, and melancholy
because there is no one playing. The rise and fall of the land is only
now apparent. In the day we learn of hills in London only by their
fatigue; in the night we can see them as if the streets did not exist,
as they must have appeared to men who climbed them with a hope of
seeing their homes from the summits or of surprising a stag beneath.
The river ran by, grim, dark and vast, and having been untouched by
history, old as hills and stars, it seemed from a bridge, not like a
wild beast in a pit, but like a strange, reminiscential amulet, worn
by the city to remind her that she shall pass. How tameless and cold
the water, alien, careless, monstrous, capable of drowning in a little
while the uttermost agony or joy and making them as if they had never
been. I passed by doors where lived people whom I knew, but it was two
o’clock in the morning; they could not know me. I wondered which of
them I could safely disturb. With what expression would they come down
from their warm beds and oblivion, with dull, puzzled eyes, and slowly
recall those things which--even the pleasant ones--our lonely lives
so often reduce to mere entries in a tedious chronicle. I left the
question unanswered.
Now I saw a tall, stiff crane surmounting the houses and nodding in
the sky, itself simple, strong, direct, weighing the city against the
heavens in an enormous balance with Rhadamanthine solemnity.
Endless were the vast caves and deserts of the streets, most strange
the unobserved, innumerable things prepared for the eyes of men on the
coming day--glittering windows of cutlery, food, drugs, sadlery--the
high walls with coloured advertisements of beer, medicine, food,
actors, newspapers, corsets, concerts, pickles. The dark windows, the
windows lit to serve some purpose unknown, seemed to make it necessary
to cry out, to raise an alarm, to make sure that the darkness or
light meant only the usual things. Now and then several streets ran
towards one another and left a square or irregular space at their
meeting, surrounded by an inn with a sign, a stone trough, an old
eighteenth-century house, its windows emphasised by white paint, a row
of pollarded limes, a scrap of orchard--once perhaps the heart of a
village. Or for almost a mile the streets ran straight, with branches
at right angles, and suddenly a large house stood back and its garden
of limes and lawn broke the monotone. The names of the streets were an
epitome of the world and time, commemorating famous and unknown men,
battles, conspiracies, far-off cities and rivers, little villages known
to me, streams and hills now buried by houses; the names of the inns
were as rich as the titles of books in an old library, suggested many
an inn by wood and mill and meadow and village square, but all confused
as if in a marine store. And as I walked through old and new villages,
rents, courts, alleys, lanes, rises, streets, buildings, roads,
avenues, I seemed to be travelling through the Inferno and Purgatorio,
but before the first man had entered them and without a guide. It was
immense, sublime, but its purposes dark and not to be explained by the
policemen here and there in charge. Nor, passing through Battersea,
did I meet the famous man who has threaded this mystery. He, at least,
would have taken me to a housetop and have unravelled space; but I
expected him at street corners and on commons in vain. But presently I
reached a sign-post that stood boldly up with undoubted inscriptions,
one of them to London, and away from that I set my face, though I saw
market-carts going the way I had come, with drowsy carters, one lamp,
and horses whose shadowy muscles quivered in the electric light. That
sign-post seemed to make all things clear. Like a prophet it rose up,
who after an age of darkness says that the path of life and goodness
is plain, that he knows it, and that all who follow him will be saved.
Not for him hesitation and qualification; but to all men perplexed by
definitions, testimonies, other prophets and their own thoughts, he
cries: “This is the way.”
“The world may find the Spring by following her.”
I followed and needed only a good marching song. By chance I lighted on
one which was first sung by countrymen. It is not triumphant--the mind
wearies of a triumphant song in solitude and at night--but it persists
and acknowledges no end. It was made by feeble, mighty-limbed men who
knew what it is to go on and on for ends which they do not entirely
apprehend. It matches the hurrying feet of the lover or the limp of the
hungry man at dawn. It begins--
“With one man, with two men,
We mow the hay together;
With three men, with four men,
We mow the hay together:
With four, with three, with two, with one, no more,
We mow the hay and rake the hay and take it away together.”
It goes on--
“With five men, with six men,
We mow the hay together;
With seven men, with eight men,
We mow the hay together;
With eight, with seven, with six, with five, with four,
with three, with two, with one, no more,
We mow the hay and rake the hay and take it away together.”
It goes on until a hundred is reached, proceeding after twenty by
tens. And so, gradually, as the song went on, the houses opened apart,
and the road ahead was a simple white line. On either hand thousands
of lights showed valleys and hills; but ahead there was a promising
darkness, and out of it came the Watercress Man with a basket of wild
flowers on his back.
“Sir,” said he, setting down his flowers slowly, “the price of a pint
of ale won’t hurt you, I suppose? I have drunk nothing since yesterday
morning.”
“But have you eaten anything?” I asked, ready to admire him for asking
first for drink.
“No,” said he, “I have neither eaten nor drunken. I drink four ale.”
“Thank you,” he said, when I had given him twopence for drink and
twopence for food. “We are all sons of one mother. You can’t get away
from that.”
“Then we are brothers,” said I.
“Certainly, if you will.”
“I should like to know you.”
“With pleasure, if you can.”
“What are you by profession?”
“A hard question. I profess nothing. By conviction I am an ill-used
man, and for the moment I am a seller of flowers.”
He showed me his flowers--kingcups, cuckoo flowers, primroses from the
moist woods.
“I will buy your flowers,” I said.
“No! I think I shall keep those,” and he put them in a horse trough
close by. I asked him if he would return into the country with me.
“No,” he replied, “it would be sunrise before we got into the country,
and I never spend the daytime in the country if I can avoid it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“As we are brothers,” he said, “I will tell you that I paint
landscapes. I like nothing on earth so well as the country. I was
dragged up in the Borough. The country for me! But the lover of Nature
and the gamekeeper and the farmer and the landowner spoil it by day.
The people are stupid, brutal. The women are not at all beautiful.
Their cowsheds are the only things they have not spoilt: they are still
sweet. As a lad I read the pastoral poets, and I know that these things
were once far different. So I live in London and paint landscapes at
sixpence a-piece, sometimes four or five of them in a morning, so that
I live well. I usually put a few red flowers in with the sixpennyworth.
I am sixty-eight; my son will succeed me, but badly--badly.”
“How is that?”
“Because he says that he paints Nature as she is, which is impossible.
I make no such mistake, as you shall see----I aim for suggestion.
Here,” he said, producing one from his pocket (a brown field sloping up
to a ridge of trees, painted black, against a silvery sky, and in that
a few rooks). “Do you not hear there the wild, angry charm of hundreds
of blackbirds and thrushes and larks? They sometimes make me lie down
and cry before the sun rises, because I am not worthy; I do not own a
little farm and drive my own plough and cause the envy of kings at my
happiness.”
“Is that clump of trees right?” I asked (in need of something to say).
“Right? But the feeling is there. Is it not cold and pure and wild? I
felt great as I did that. But see here again!”
Here he brought out another, also in three colours, of a landscape at
dawn. Three black firs stood at the top of a steep down, and from them
went a pair of dark birds out along a silver sky.
“I never put figures in my landscapes,” he explained, “but is not the
spirit of a small sweet Amaryllis in it? _Ah! lovely as thou art to
look upon, ah, heart of stone, ah, dark-browed maiden!_ Does she not
hide somewhere out of the picture; and does not a shepherd, seated
perhaps under those fir trees, look for her coming? Is not the Golden
Age in that sky?”
“I am glad,” said I, “that you believe in a Golden Age. Literature and
art are continually recreating it for us.”
“Modern literature,” he said scornfully, “is by those who have not seen
for those who do not care. What answer has literature to this?” Here
he showed a third sketch.
“I know nothing of literature,” I said; “I am a journalist.”
He sighed with relief, and pointed to a yellow thatched house with
windows open on to the sea, and behind the house the usual dark trees
and silver sky.
“There,” he exclaimed, “literature does not believe in or understand
the honest life, bound up with the seasons and beauty which is
expressed by that simple scene. See, there, equal laws, harmony, aims
unspotted by the world, not fearing nor loving kings. Any thoughtful
man living in a scene like that would be wiser, and it would be
impossible for him to err. I myself would venture to be a Daphnis or
Menalcas again there. I can hear the one living pastoral poet saying in
that cottage by the sea--
“Come, pretty Phyllis, you are late!
The cows are crowding round the gate.
An hour or more, the sun has set;
The stars are out; the grass is wet;
The glow-worms shine; the beetles hum;
The moon is near--come, Phyllis, come!
The black cow thrusts her brass-tipped horns
Among the quick and bramble thorns;
The red cow jerks the padlock chain;
The dun cow shakes her bell again,
And round and round the chestnut tree,
The white cow bellows lustily.” ...
He knew all four verses by heart.
“Your aims are wonderful,” I stammered. “If I could only see you at
work, if you would only show me the scenes which inspire such antique
and lofty emotions....”
“See! this is London--nothing but trees--I have seen it so as I came
home. But I cannot go with you. I return to think about the Golden Age.”
He tied the flowers round the pole of a signboard that stood on a harsh
courtyard of gravel strewn with dirty paper, and pursued his homeward
road, eager for “The Old Angel” or “The Chequers” where he could vivify
his vision of the Golden Age.
In the sky, the distant dawn sent up to the clouds a faint dream of
light that made their shapes just visible. A hedge-sparrow awoke in the
furze beside the road, twittered clearly and became silent again; on
the other side, in some invisible trees high up, a few rooks began to
talk. Then, for a little while as I went on, the darkness was complete,
and the silence also, except that the telegraph wires forced a faint
complaint out of the light wind.
As the clouds filled with that dream of light and the road began
visibly to lengthen out, I left London behind or recognised it only
in the blue bowls and copper-ware gleaming through the windows of
new houses round about. Beyond them rolled a ploughed country of
such abounding and processional curves that it seemed almost to move
and certainly to rejoice; here and there the curves dimpled suddenly
and made a hollow, where elm or beech sprang up in the midst of the
ploughland, in a small consistory, grave, shining, fair. To right and
left, where the curves of the land rose to the sky, the white foam of
orchards half buried rosy farmhouses and their own dark boughs. The
dense thorn hedges gleamed all wet, compelling the wind to dip deep
into them and taste their fragrance, coolness, moistness, softness all
together, envying not the earnest bee, or the dallying butterfly, or
even the insect that was drowning in a dewy flower. How the dew washed
away the night! I thought that the old man had spoken truly when he
said that the Golden Age comes again with every dawn. The dew gave
the eyes a kind of fitness and worthiness to behold the white fruit
blossom and the sudden hills of horse-chestnut green. It washed out
London as the old man’s brush had done. See! the world is but a brown
and fragrant cloud decorated with dark boles, green foliage, white
bloom, and here and there a soul akin to them; it turns the wilful
mind into a garden neat and fine, of red and white, with green lawns
between, which the bee Fancy sucks at and combines. For a minute only,
in one shadowed wood that faced the departing night, all the birds
sang together stormily and hardly moving from the sprays on which they
slept, with something of night in their voices. But as I entered the
wood, already the most of them had gone hither and thither, and only
on high twigs one or two blackbirds and thrushes sang, and hidden wood
pigeons cooed. The young hazel boughs bent at the top with fresh leaves
that were so beautiful and frail that they seemed but just to have been
persuaded to stay and give up a winged life. The low wych elm twigs
had been dipped in leaves. Wild cherry leaves and flowers mingled like
lovers so young that the boy rivals the girl in tenderness. There was
no path, and pushing through hazel and cornel and thorn, I saw the
eyes of sitting birds gleam with a little anger through the lustrous
green. Presently the stems were less dense; a little river ran through
freshly cut underwood of hazel and ash and oak, their wounds still
flashing. There pale primroses and the last celandines ran in sharp
gulfs into the heart of bluebell and orchis and cuckoo-flower, and
the orange-tipped butterfly tripped over them. The mosses on the ash
and hazel roots gleamed darkly gold and green. In the rivulet itself
broad kingcups swayed and their leaves sank into darkness and rose into
light as the ripples fluctuated. The blackbird, fed on golden hours,
sang carelessly, time after time, the two opening phrases of an old
Highland melody. Close by, in the cool, sombre, liquid air between the
new-leaved boughs of beech sang a cuckoo, and his notes seemed not to
die but to nestle and grow quiet among the leaves overhead and the
flowers underfoot, and some of them even to find their embalming in the
little round hawthorn clouds that sailed high above in a deep stream of
blue.
Suddenly my mind went back to the high dark cliffs of Westminster
Abbey, the blank doors and windows of endless streets, the devouring
river, the cold gloom before dawn, and then with a shudder forgot them
and saw the flowers and heard the birds with such a joy as when the
ships from Tarshish, after three blank years, again unloaded apes and
peacocks and ivory, and men upon the quay looked on; or as, when a man
has mined in the dead desert for many days, he suddenly enters an old
tomb, and making a light, sees before him vases of alabaster, furniture
adorned with gold and blue enamel and the figures of gods, a chariot of
gold, and a silence perfected through many ages in the company of death
and of the desire of immortality.
PART II
THE LOWLAND
CHAPTER II
FAUNUS
How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts
and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early
morning! Under the dewy, dark-green woodside they wheel, pause and go
out into the strong light again, and they seem one and glorious, as if
the all-breeding earth had just sent them up out of her womb--mighty,
splendid and something grim, with darkness and primitive forces
clinging about them, and the night in the horses’ manes.
The ship, the chariot, the plough, these three are, I suppose, the most
sovereign beautiful things which man has made in his time, and such
that were his race to pass away from the earth, would bring him most
worship among his successors.
All are without parallel in nature, wrought out of his own brain by
unaided man; and yet, during their life, worthy by their beauty, their
purpose and their motion to challenge anything made by the gods on the
earth or in the sea; and after their life is done, sublime and full
of awe, so that when we come upon them neglected and see their fair,
heroic curves, the dirge at their downfall passes inevitably into a
pæan to their majesty. And they are very old. Probably the beasts and
the birds, the winds and waves and hills know us as the creatures who
make the ship, the chariot and the plough. These three things, as they
go about their work, must have become universal symbols, so that when
a man comes in sight, the other inhabitants of the earth say: Here is
he who sails in ships and drives the chariot and guides the plough. And
the greatest of all is the plough. It is without pride and also without
vanity. The ship and the chariot have sometimes tried to conceal their
ancient simplicity, though they have never done without it. But the
plough is the same--in shape like a running hound, with tail uplifted
and muzzle bowed to the scent.
Richard the ploughman is worthy of his plough and team. He moves
heavily with long strides over the baked yellow field, swaying with the
violent motion of the plough as it cuts the stubborn and knotty soil,
and yet seeming to sway out of joy and not necessity. He is a straight,
small-featured, thin-lipped man, red-haired and with blue eyes of a
fierce loneliness almost fanatical. Hour after hour he crosses and
recrosses the field, up to the ridge, whence he can see miles of hill
and wood; down to the woodside where the rabbits hardly trouble to hide
as he appears, or to the thick hedge with marigolds below and nearly
all day the song of nightingales. The furrow is always straight; he
could plough it so asleep, and sometimes perhaps he does. The larks
sing invisible in the white May sky. The swallows and woodlarks and
willow wrens and linnets, with their tenderest of all mortal voices,
flit and sing about him. Partridges whirr and twang. A fox steals along
the hedge, a squirrel glows and ripples across a bay of the field. And
for a little time he notices these things in a mild complacency. He
has even formed a theory that there is another finch like a chaffinch,
but not such a singer, and he calls it a piefinch. He likes the bright
weather, and his cheerful greeting leaves the passer-by feeling stupid
because he cannot equal it; few sounds can equal it, except the shout
of a cuckoo and the abandoned clamour of a deep-voiced hound. He never
becomes tired; at noon and evening in the tavern, he drinks standing,
with one hand on the high door latch and the other holding the tankard,
and talking all the time at the rate of one phrase to a minute, with
serious mouth and distant eyes which must be symbols to help out the
words, for certainly if those words mean no more than they would in
another man’s mouth, they convey little but the apparent _ennui_ of all
those long hours walking to this oak or that hawthorn spray.
At first sight the ploughman’s task seems to be one which ought
rightly to be set only to some well-balanced philosopher, who could
calmly descend into himself during the many lonely hours and think
of nature and man in orderly thoughts. To the ordinary man, with his
drug-habit of taking to reverie during any long spell of solitude,
such a task would seem fatal. In fact, it is pretty certain that many
a plain fellow must be turned into a fool by the immense monotony
of similar furrows and the same view repeated exactly every quarter
of an hour. When he is still a boy, he goes about even in the four
hours’ darkness of the winter mornings with always a song amidst the
sleet or the silent frost. At lunch he can look for nests or nuts or
hunt a stoat. When work is over he looks forward to songs at “The
Chequers” with those of his own age, or to a shamefaced walk with a
girl, or to fishing for tench and eels, or even to a game of cricket.
But when he is married all that is past. He leads his horses down to
the plough, having some simple thought, a grievance, a recollection,
perhaps a hope, running confusedly in his head, and all day he turns
it over, repeating himself, exaggerating, puzzling over the meaning of
someone’s words, floundering in digressions, fitting new words to the
wood-pigeon’s talk, trying to keep straight and to make up his mind,
justifying himself, condemning another, cursing him. Now and then he
lifts his eyes to the sky or the wooded hills and his mind catches at
an impression which never becomes a thought, but something between a
picture and a tune in the head, and its half oblivion is pleasant, when
suddenly the plough leaps forward from his relaxing grasp, he shouts
“Ah, Charley!” to the leader, mutters a little and settles down again
to the grievance or the recollection or the hope, to be disturbed on
lucky days by the hounds, perhaps, but otherwise to go on and on;
and at noon and evening he takes his horses back to the stable and
confronts men with the same simple ejaculations as before, after the
last glass possibly reviving his lonely thoughts, but ineffectually.
“How Bill does talk!” they say. What wonder that the rustic moralist
marks an infant’s tomb with the words--
“When the archangel’s trump shall blow
And souls to bodies join,
Millions shall wish their lives below
Had been as brief as thine.”
But Richard is no ordinary man, for he is happy and proud, and
somewhere in the fields or in the clouds that roll before him as his
plough comes to the top of the ridge, he has found that draught of
excellent grace--
“Few men but such as sober are and sage,
Are by the gods to drink thereof assigned;
But such as drink, eternal happiness do find.”
There is little of wisdom in his words except moderation; but his
garden is luckier, his kitchen sweeter than all the rest in the hamlet,
and of all his tasks--ploughing, harrowing, rolling, drudging, reaping,
mowing, carting faggots or corn or hay or green meat or dung--he likes
none better than the others, because he likes them all well as they
come. And ah! to see him and his team all dark and large and heroic
against the sky, ploughing in the winter or the summer morning, or to
see him grooming the radiant horses in their dim stable on a calm,
delaying evening, is to see one who is in league with sun and wind and
rain to make odours fume richly from the ancient altar, to keep the
earth going in beauty and fruitfulness for still more years.