STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE
RETURNING to Stockbridge, _en route_ for Salisbury, eight miles more of
roads of the same unchanging characteristics, but growing more
plentifully carpeted with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to
Wiltshire and to a junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe
Corner. In the neighbourhood are “the Wallops,” as local parlance refers
to a group of three villages, Over and Nether Wallop, with the wayside
settlement of Little (or Middle) Wallop in between. It is this
last-named to which Mr. Hardy refers when he tells how the ruined and
broken-hearted Mayor of Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his
vanished greatness and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser,
became employed at a “pastoral farm near the old western highway. . . .
He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that,
situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually
nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless
spot only half as remote.” Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in
fact just forty-nine and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road.
In less than another mile on our westward way the sight of a solitary
house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness arouses speculations
in the pilgrim’s mind—speculations resolved on approach, when the sight
of the recently restored picture-sign of the “Pheasant,” reared up on its
posts on the short grass of the open down, opposite its door, proclaims
this to be the old coaching inn once famed as “Winterslow Hut.” None
ever spoke of the inn in those days as the “Pheasant,” although that was
the sign of it, plainly to be seen; as “Winterslow Hut” it was always
known, and a more lonely, forbidding place of seclusion from the haunts
of man it would be difficult to find. It was once, appropriately enough,
the retreat of a lonely, forbidding person—the self-selected place of
exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from his wife
at the village of West Winterslow (whence the inn takes its name of
“Winterslow Hut”) two miles away, lived here from 1819 to 1828. Here he
wrote the essays on “Persons one would wish to have seen,” and the much
less sociable essay, “On Living to One’s Self”—an art he practised here
to his own satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons
with whom he quarrelled. And here he saw the Exeter Mail and the
stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even lonelier, in the
intervals after their passing, than it seems now that the Road, as an
institution, is dead and the Rail conveys the traffic to and from
Salisbury and the west, some two miles distant, across country hidden
from view from this point beneath the swelling shoulders of the
unchanging downs.
Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long drop into the valley of the
Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins; its slender spire, the
tallest in England, thrusting its long needle-point 404 feet into the
blue, and oddly peering out from the swooping sides of the downs, long
before any suspicion of Sarum itself—as the milestones style it—has
occupied the mind of the literary pilgrim.
Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster, does not look
its age. When you are told how Old Sarum was abandoned, New Sarum
founded, and everything recreated _ad hoc_ at the command of Bishop
Poore, impelled thereto by a vision, in the then customary way, you are
so impressed with what we are used to regard as such thoroughly
“American” proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such
a method, how very long ago all this was done. This great change of site
took place about 1220, and sixty years later the great cathedral,
remarkable and indeed unique among all our cathedrals for being designed
and built, from the laying of the foundation stone to the roofing-in of
the building, in one—the Early English—style, was completed. It was
actually a century later that the spire itself was finished.
Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the regularity
of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the comparative breadth
of its streets. To that phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch,
whose like certainly could never have been met with outside the pages of
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, Salisbury seemed “a very desperate sort of place; an
exceedingly wild and dissipated city.” Here we smile superior, although
it is true that in his short story, _On the Western Circuit_, Mr. Hardy
presents Melchester, as he names this fair city, as given over to blazing
orgies in the progress of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting
merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than
they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
should have been. Granting the truth of this picture of Melchester Fair,
it is to be observed that this is but an interlude in a twelvemonth’s
programme of polished, decorous, and well-ordered urbanity. Its
character is more truly portrayed in _Jude the Obscure_, where Sue
Bridehead having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the
Close, her cousin Jude follows her. He found it “a quiet and soothing
place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly
learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment.” It was here
he obtained work at his trade of stonemason, labouring on the restoration
of the cathedral; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and mediæval
bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit for a talk in the
cathedral by the proposal that she would rather wait in the railway
station: “That’s the centre of town life now—the cathedral has had its
day!” To his shocked interjection, “How modern you are!” she replied
defensively, “I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than
mediævalism, if you only knew”; meaning thereby that she was enamoured of
classicism and the old pagans.
To Sue the cathedral was not unsympathetic merely by force of that
clear-cut regularity which impresses most beholders with a sense of a
splendid, but cold, perfection. There are those who compare this great
fane with Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
Dead perfection, no more;
but while those critics are critics only of design and carved stones, who
would welcome something in its regular features paralleled by a
tip-tilted nose in a human face, Sue was obviously preoccupied by the
sense that it, not alone among cathedrals, has outlived the devotional
needs that produced it, and is little more than a magnificent museum of
architectural antiquities. That magnificence would be even more complete
and pronounced had not the egregious James Wyatt been let loose upon the
“restoration” of it, towards the close of the eighteenth century, when he
cast out and destroyed most of its internal adornments, and pulled down
and utterly obliterated the beautiful detached bell tower, coeval with
the cathedral itself, which stood, away from it, on the north side.
It is perhaps worthy of remark that there may be noticed in the cathedral
the tomb, with somewhat bombastic inscription, of Dr. D’Albigny
Turberville, the seventeenth-century oculist, who died, aged 85, in 1696.
The flagrant Latin, which tells us that his fame shall perish no sooner
than this marble, does not allow for human forgetfulness, nor for the
advances of science.
The Normal School in the Close, whence Sue escaped, after being confined
to her room as a punishment for her night’s escapade with Jude, is a
prominent building, described as “an ancient edifice of the fifteenth
century, once a palace . . . with mullioned and transomed windows, and a
courtyard in front shut in from the road by a wall.”
[Picture: Salisbury Cathedral]
From the ever-impending tragedy of Jude’s ambitions it is a relief to
turn to the pure comedy of Betty Dornell, the first Countess of Wessex,
in that collection of diverting short stories, _A Group of Noble Dames_.
Looking upon those two old inns, the “Red Lion” in the High Street and
the “White Hart,” we are reminded that it was to the first-named that
Betty resorted with that husband with whom, although married at an early
age, she had not lived.
“‘Twice we met by accident,’ pleaded Betty to her mother. ‘Once at
Abbot’s Cernel and another time at the “Red Lion,” Melchester.’
“‘O, thou deceitful girl!’ cried Mrs. Dornell. ‘An accident took you to
the “Red Lion” whilst I was staying at the “White Hart”! I remember—you
came in at twelve o’clock at night and said you’d been to see the
cathedral by the light o’ the moon!’
“‘My ever-honoured mamma, so I had! I only went to the “Red Lion” with
him afterwards.’”
Nine miles to the north of Melchester stands Stonehenge, reached after
their flight through the deserted midnight streets of the city by Tess
and Angel Clare, vainly endeavouring to elude justice after the murder of
the sham D’Urberville at Sandbourne. The night was “as dark as a cave,”
and a stiff breeze blew as they came out upon the black solitudes of
Salisbury Plain. For some miles they had proceeded thus, when “on a
sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front,
rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against
it.
“‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.
“‘It hums,’ said she. ‘Hearken!’
“The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the
note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.” It was indeed Stonehenge, “a
very Temple of the Winds.”
And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the Altar
Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly against the
coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards them appeared rising
out of the hollows of the great plain. At the same time Clare heard the
brush of feet behind him: they were surrounded. Thoughts of resistance
came to him; but “‘It’s no use, sir,’ said the foremost plain-clothes
man: ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is
reared.’” And so they stood watching while Tess finished her sleep.
Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to renew its
interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this mysterious
monument of prehistoric ages is wofully disappointing. No use to strive
against that disappointment as you come up the long rises from Amesbury
under the midday sun and see its every time-worn cranny displayed
mercilessly in the impudent eye of day: the interval between anticipation
and realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and
insignificance of the great stone circles must, although unwillingly, be
allowed. This comparative insignificance is, however, largely the effect
of their almost boundless environment of vast downs, tumid with the
attendant circles of prehistoric tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned
with its clump of trees, like the tufted plumes of a hearse.
[Picture: Stonehenge]
Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stonehenge, which was probably
standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and seems by the most
reasoned theories to have really been a Temple of the Sun. Its name is
only the comparatively modern one of “Stanenges,” or “the hanging
stones,” given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment
as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from any
reference to the capital punishment of _sus. per coll._, but from the
great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall rude columns, and
may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a height of twenty-five
feet.
Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a “monument to all time,” speak
not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly
weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years. No good
has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of
“scientific” men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for
shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest
its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone
chippings. Then a last indignity befell it. Sir Edward Antrobus, of
Amesbury, lord of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property,
and, erecting a barbed-wire fence around it, levied a fee of a shilling a
head for admission through the turnstiles that click you through, for all
the world as though you were entering some Earl’s Court Exhibition. The
impudence that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of
undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically—much larger than
Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed belittles and vulgarises.