should first begin to tackle it, or by what end one should take it.
Every man according to his own study, every man according to his own
bent or accident of experience, takes it by his own handle, and the
one man speaks of the language, the other of the hills, another of the
architecture, another of the names. For my part I would desire to speak
of all.
When one gets over a certain boundary one is in a peculiar district
of this world, a special countryside of Europe, a happy land with a
conviction and a tradition of its own which may not have a name, but
which is in general the West Country, and which by its hills and by its
men and women convinces any true traveller at once of its personality.
More than one man after a dreary wandering southwards through the
Midlands has walked by night up one of its fresh streets to an inn and
cried: “What! Have I come upon Paradise?” And this feeling comes also
when one has climbed up the Cotswold through the little places of stone
and suddenly sees the valley floor of the Severn so full of orchards,
or has come over the flat deserts of the Upper Thames and had revealed
to him the Golden Valley; or, after plodding through Wiltshire, has
smelt an air which told him that not far off were the heavy tides of
that haunted sea which runs between the Welsh hills and the peninsula
of Cornwall and Devon. Men are lost in these seas and are saved in them
perpetually as by miracles: I can appeal, in this print, to how many?
They have been saved by the miracle of that water. Here Arthur was
cast up by the waves: on to that flat salt, in its calm, full of mists,
looked out those who gave us our legend of his Court.
The boundary into this particular land is not only fetched by men on
foot; in no matter what kind of travel one pursues, one recognises that
boundary in a flash as one traverses it. It is not only the orchards,
nor the abrupt and pointed hills, nor those domestic towns, happy with
memories, nor those clear waters, nor those meadows, bounded by careful
walls of stone, but something much more which tells one that one has
got into the enchanted land. That spirit in it which made the stuff of
our early history, which gave us the landing of Joseph of Arimathea and
the glorious bush of Glastonbury and the cycle of the Round Table and
those good verses with regard to passion unrestrained:
... well you wot that of such life
There comes but sore battaille and strife
And blood of men and hard Travail....
And the prophecies of Merlin, and the story of Tristan and Iseult and
all the vision of immortality and of resurrection inhabits it still.
I never can believe (I speak for myself alone) that man can be
dissociated from his earth any more than I can believe that the soul
can be dissociated from the body. When men say to me that there is no
soul, they can go on saying. But when men say that the soul can neglect
the body then there is matter for argument; and when the argument is
finished one finds it is not so. Now thus it is with the earth that
breeds us and into which if we are content to die at home (and since
we must die somewhere, better die there) we should at last return. The
landscapes of Europe make European men, and it is not for nothing that
the climate and the shapes of the hills and the nature of the building
stuff change just where man changes.
There is enchantment upon every high place of England, but the
enchantment of the Devonshire Moors and of the Tors to the North and
upwards from them is different from the enchantment of the Downs. There
is a great delight in the proper fireplaces of the English people, but
who, thoroughly alive, could mistake a fireplace in the West Riding for
a fireplace on the Western Rother or either of these for a fireplace
a little before Sherborne in the tumbles and the hollows where Dorset
and Somerset meet? There is a richness of the speech and a contentment
of the tongue which any man from the new countries might think common
to all English agricultural men: yet there was a man from Sussex who,
hearing the Sussex tongue in the Choughs at Yeovil, felt himself indeed
come home. Our provinces differ very much.
I have sometimes wondered whether in the process of time these little
intimate differences of ours will survive. I wish they would! I wish
they would, by the Lord! The Greeks were a little people, yet their
provinces have survived, and the contempt that Aspasia felt for the
Peloponnesus is (or should be) yet recorded. The hill tribes behind
the Phoenician coast were a little people, but the fame of their
religion, of their civil wars, has survived that of the merchants of
Tyre. Rome, Veii, and the others were little places like Arundel and
Pulborough, quite close together; but they were talked of, and men know
much of them to-day.
I could wish the differences of this island were so known and that
people coming from a long way off would be humble and learn those
differences. Surely a nation grows great in this way, by many provinces
reacting one upon the other, recognised by the general will, sometimes
in conflict with it. At any rate the West Country is a province of
Europe; no one can get into it without touching his youth again and
putting his fingers to earth, and getting sustenance from it, as a man
does when he turns at the turning point of a race and touches earth
with his fingers and is strong again to spring forward.
The Weald
Among the changes that have come upon England with the practice and
facility for rapid travel many would put first the conquest (some would
call it the spoiling) of little-known and isolated stretches of English
landscape; and men still point out with a sort of jealous pride those
districts, such as the upper Cotswolds, which modern travel has not
disturbed. It seems to me that there is another feature attaching to
the facility for travel, and that is this, that men can now tell other
men what their countrysides are like; men can now compare one part of
England with another in a way that once they could not do, and this
facility in communication which so many deplore has so much good about
it at least, in that it permits right judgments. There have been men in
the past who have travelled widely for the mere pleasure of seeing many
parts of their own country--Cobbett was one--but they were rare. As the
towns grew, commercial travelling led men only to the towns, but now
the thing is settling down. Men travel everywhere, all kinds of men,
and no part of England remains of which a man can say that he loves it
without knowing why he loves it, or that its character is indefinable.
So it is with the Weald.
All that roll of land which lies held between and above the chalk of
South-Eastern England, the clay and the sand, and the uncontinuous
short trees, the muddy little rivers, the scattered homesteads, the
absence of levels, and almost the absence of true hills, the distant
prospects northwards and southwards of quite another land, the blue
lines and naked heights a day’s journey away against the sky--all that
is the Weald. And it runs from the place where the two lines of chalk
meet in Hampshire beyond Selborne, and beyond Petersfield, right away
to the sea which it sweeps upon in a grand curve, between Pevensey
(which was once the chief port of the Weald) and the heights round
Hastings: for though these heights are in a manner part of the Weald,
yet between them and the chalk again by Folkestone no true Wealden
country lies.
Unless a man understands the Weald he cannot easily write about the
beginnings of England, and yet historians have not understood it.
Only the men mixed into it and married with it or born upon it have
understood it, and these, I say, until lately were not permitted by
constant travel that judgment by analogy and by contrast which teaches
us the true meaning of things that we had hitherto only instinctively
known. Now a Wealden man can say certain things about his countryside
which are of real value to history and perhaps to politics as well; at
any rate, to politics in that larger sense of patriotism intelligently
appreciating the future of one’s own land. Thus the Wealden man, now
that he knows so much else in England, can tell the historian that the
Weald was never the impenetrable forest which historians would make of
it. It lay in a barrier between the ports of the Channel and the Thames
Valley. But the barrier was not uninhabited; it was not impassable.
Its scattered brushwood was patchy, its soil never permanently marshy
nor ever for long distances difficult for a mounted man or a man on
foot. The Weald from the very beginning had homesteads in it, but it
had not agglomerations of houses, nor had it parishes save in very few
places. If you look at the map now you can see how the old parishes
stretch northward and southward in long strips from the chalk and
loam country up towards the forest ridge which is the centre of the
Weald. Those long strips were the hunting rights of the village folk
and their lords. Of some parishes carved out of the central Weald we
can accurately tell the origin. We know that they were colonised as it
were, cleared, and had their church built for them in the great spurt
of civilisation which marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Men
would understand the early history of the Weald better, and with it the
early military history of South-Eastern England, if they would take
one of the old forest paths--as that from Rusper, for instance, which
works its way down, now as a metalled road, now as a green lane, now as
a mere footpath with right of way, past the two old “broad” fords on
the upper Arun and the marshy land east of Pulborough until it gets to
Roundabout, and so to Storrington. All the history of communications in
the Weald is exemplified in such a journey--and it is a journey which,
though it is little more than twenty miles in length, takes quite a
day. You have the modern high road, the green lane of the immediate
past, and in places a mere track of remote antiquity. You see just
how difficult it is to traverse the clay, how the occasional knobs of
sand relieve your going; you can notice the character of the woodland
where it is still untouched, and if you are wise you will notice one
thing above all, and that is the character of the water. Now it is
this which explains the Weald. Many bad bits of clay in Europe have
formed highways for armies--for instance, all that rotten land in the
great bend of the Loire which the Romans called the _Solitarium_, and
which the French called the _Sologne_. But the Weald differs from most
others in this, that good and plentiful water is hard to find. It is
not the muddiness of the streams that is the chief defence of the place
against human travel and habitation; it is the way in which, when rain
has fallen and when water is plentiful, going is difficult, and the
way in which, when a few days of dry weather come, the going becomes
easy, but the water in the little streams disappears. There is evidence
that the Romans, when they built their great military road--perhaps
their only purely military road in Britain--across the Weald skipped
one intervening station which should, upon the analogy of others, have
been present upon it in the heart of the Weald, and pressed the march
in this place to nearly double its usual length. The French armies
do precisely the same thing in the bad lands of the Plain of Chalons
to-day. Wherever there is ancient habitation in the Weald, or rather
upon the fringes of the Weald, there is good, plentiful, and perennial
water; elsewhere the Weald is still what it has been throughout
history--a great rolling place, not deserted, not lonely, and yet not
humanised. It is exactly the place for a seclusion from men, for you
can see some men, but not too many of them; and I have always thought
that King wise, who, when his enemies desired to kill him, wandered
in the Andredsweald. The historians say that he took refuge in the
impassable thickets of the forest. This is bosh. No man can sleep
out in this climate for a season round, nor can any man live without
cooked meat, nor do I see an Anglo-Saxon king living without wine and
a good deal of pomp into the bargain. As to the wine, men might argue,
but as to the pomp, they cannot. I will tell you what this King did
without any doubt. He went from steading to steading and was royally
entertained, and if you ask why it was a refuge for him the answer is
that it was a refuge against the pursuit of many men.
The Weald is a refuge against the pursuit of many men. It was so then:
it is so now.
And this leads me to my conclusion. The Weald will never be conquered.
It will always be the Weald. To be conquered is to suffer the will
of another: the Weald will suffer no will but its own. The men of
the Weald drive out men odious to them in manner sometimes subtle,
sometimes brutal, always in the long run successful. Economics break
against the Weald as water breaks against stone. It is not a long walk
from London. Your Londoner in summer comes and builds in it. So foreign
birds their nests. But unlike the foreign birds, he does not return
with each returning spring. For the Weald will welcome the bird for the
pleasure the bird gives it, and drive it out when the pleasure is done.
Now it welcomes the Londoner for his money, and this feature in the
Londoner is not recurrent with the seasons.
Here is some Latin which I am assured is grammatical and correctly
spelled as well:
Stat et stabit: manet et manebit, spectator orbis.
She stands and still shall stand; she remains and shall remain: a
watcher of the generations.
On London and the Houses in it
The aspect of London, as the man who knows it grows older, begins to
take on characters of permanence and characters of change, both of
which are comparable to those of a human life. It is perceived that
certain qualities in the great soul of the place are permanent, and
that the memories of many common details merge after the passage of
years into a general picture which is steadfast and gives unity to the
whole.
This is especially true of the London skies, and more true, I think, of
the London skies in autumn than at any other season of the year. Men go
home from the City or from the Courts westward at an hour which is that
of sunset, when the river catches more light than at any other time:
the mixture of mist and smoke and of those shapes in our clouds, beyond
the reek of the town, which are determined by the south-west wind
blowing up the line of the valley, make together an impression which
is the most lasting of the landscapes in which we live. These it was
which inspired Turner when he drew them from the deserted room in the
tower of Battersea Church, or from that corner house over the River,
whence he could watch evening after evening the heavy but transparent
colours which enter into the things he painted. Many foreigners, caught
by the glamour of that artist, have missed the source whence his mellow
and declining sunlight was inspired; its source was in these evening
and autumn skies of London. There is a permanence also in the type of
home which London built for more than two centuries, and which was
laid down after the Great Fire, and there is a permanence in the older
stonework. It is difficult or impossible to define what there is in
common between the brown stock brick of London, which is the stuff of
all its background whether of large houses or mean, and the black and
white weathering of Portland stone. Perhaps the unity which seems to
bind them is wholly in the mind, and depends merely upon association,
but it is very strong upon anyone who has grown up from childhood into
middle age surrounded by the vision of this town; and it would seem as
though London was only London because of those rough surfaces of soft
stonework, streaked with white wedges, scaling off the grime of St.
Martin’s, or St. Clement Dane’s, or the fine front of the Admiralty,
and standing out clear against the general brown mass of the streets.
The quite new things have no character at all. One wonders what
cosmopolitan need can have produced them. London never produced them,
with their stone that so often is plaster, and their alien suggestion
of whatever is least national in Paris or New York. London never
produced them.
The noise of the streets in spite of every change remains the same,
it is the same comforting and distant roar, like the roar of large
waters among hills, which every visitor has noticed, with its sharp
contrast to the rattle and cries of other great capitals. Why it should
be so no one, I think, has discovered, though many have described it,
but it remains an unmistakable thing, and if a London man, who had
travelled and was far away, should be set down by a spirit in London,
not knowing where he was, when he heard through a window high above the
street this distant and continuous roar, he would know that he had come
home. It should surely in theory have disappeared, this chief physical
characteristic of the great place, yet neither the new electricity and
the hissing of the wires, nor the new paving, nor even the new petrol
seem to change it. It is still a confused and powerful and subdued
voice, like a multitude undecided. The silence also does not change.
The way in which in countless spots you pass through an unobserved
low passage, or through an inconspicuous narrow turning, and find
yourself in a deserted place, from which the whole life of London seems
blanketed out, has been to every traveller and to every native part of
the charm and surprise of London. Dickens knew it very well, and makes
of it again and again a dramatic something in his work which stamps it
everywhere with the soul of London. In every decade men growing older
deplore the disappearance of this or that sanctuary of isolation and
silence, but in the aggregate they never disappear; something in the
very character of the people reproduces them continually, and if any
man will borrow the leisure--even a man who knows his London well--to
peer about and to explore for one Saturday afternoon in one square mile
of older London, how many such unknown corners will he not find! The
populace also upon whom all this is founded remain the same.
What changes in London are the things that also change in the life of
a man, and nothing more than the relationship of particular spots and
particular houses to our own lives. There is perhaps no city in the
world where, under the permanence of the general type, there is so
perpetual a flow and disturbance of association. It has even become
normal to the life of the citizens, and the conception of a fixed home
has left them. Here and there--but more and more rarely with every
year--you may point out a great house which some wealthy family has
chosen to inhabit for some few generations; but fixity of tenure,
tradition, family tradition at least, and sacred hereditary things,
either these were never proper to London or they have gone; it is this
which overspreads a continued knowledge of London with an increasing
loneliness and with memories that find no satisfaction or expression,
but re-enter the heart of a man and do a hurt to him there.
There are so many strange doors that should be familiar doors. Turning
sometimes into some street where one has turned for years to find at a
very well-known number windows of a certain aspect and little details
in the drab exterior of the house, every one of which was as familiar
as a smile, one is (by the mere association of years and of a gesture
repeated a thousand times) in the act of coming to the steps and of
seeking an entry. The whole place is as much one’s friend and as much
indicative of one’s friend as would be his clothes or his voice or any
other external thing. He is not there, and the house is worse than
empty. London grows full of such houses as a man grows older. Most of
us have other losses sharper still, which men of other cities know less
well, for most of us pass and repass the house where we were born, or
where as children we gathered all the strongest impressions of life. It
is impossible to believe that other souls are inheriting the effect of
those familiar rooms. It is worse than a death; it is a kind of treason.
I know a house in Wimpole Street of which every part is as familiar
quite as the torn leaves of the old books of childhood, but I have
passed it and repassed it for how many years, forbidden an entrance,
and finding that ancient and fixed friend in league, so to speak,
with strangers. Or, in another manner, which of us does not know a
house like any other house, amid the thousand unmarked houses in the
better streets of the town, but to us quite individual because there
met within it once so many who were for us the history of our time?
It was in that room (where are the three windows) that she received
her guests, retaining on into the last generations of a worse and
degraded time the traditions of a better society. Here came men who
could discuss and reveal things that are now distorted legends, and
whose revelations were real because they came as witnesses: soldiers of
the Crimea, of India, of Italy, and of Algiers, or men who remembered
great actions within the State: actions that were significant through
conviction, before we became what we are. Here was breeding; here were
the just limits of tone and emphasis and change, and here was that
type of intercourse which was surely as great and as good a thing as
Europe or England has known. Who sees that room to-day? What taste has
replaced her taste? What choice of stuff or colour mars the decoration
on the walls? What trash or alien thing takes the place of that careful
elaborate womanly work in which her travels throughout the world were
recorded, and in which the excellent modesty of an art sufficient for
her purpose reproduced in line and in colour the ironic nobility of her
mind and the wide expanse of her learning? We do not know and we cannot
know. The house is neither ours nor hers. To whomever it has passed it
has turned traitor to us who knew.
It is better, I think, for those who have such memories when the
material things that enshrine them wholly disappear, for then there is
no jar, no agony of contrast between that society which once was and
this which now is, with its quality of wealth and of the uses to which
wealth is put to-day. If we must suffer the intolerable and clumsy
presence of accidental power--power got suddenly, got anyhow, got by
chance, untrained and unworthy--at least may we suffer such things in
their own surroundings, in huge conservatories, with loud music, with
an impression of partial drunkenness all around, and a certainty all
around of intellectual incompetence and of sprawling bodies and souls.
It is better to suffer these new things in such surroundings as may
easily let one believe that one is not in London at all, but on the
Riviera; and let the heat be excessive, and let there be a complete
ignorance of all wine except champagne, and let it be a place where
champagne is supposed to be one wine. Then the frame will suit the
picture, and there will at least be no desecration of material things
by human beings unworthy of the bricks and mortar. I say it is much
better when the old houses disappear, at least the old houses in which
we knew and loved the better people of a better time:--and yet the
youth or childhood in which so many of us saw the last of it is not
thirty years, is barely twenty years dead!
On Old Towns
Every man who has a civilised backing behind him, every man, that is,
born to a citizenship which has history to nourish it, knows, loves,
desires to inhabit, and returns to, the Old Towns; but the more one
thinks of it the more difficult one finds it to determine in what this
appetite consists.