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TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS.
[Illustration: CHAIRING TOM IN THE QUADRANGLE. P. 358.]
TOM BROWN'S
SCHOOL DAYS
BY AN OLD BOY
[Illustration]
With Illustrations by Arthur Hughes and Sydney Prior Hall
New York
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1880
TO
MRS. ARNOLD,
OF FOX HOWE,
THIS BOOK IS (WITHOUT HER PERMISSION)
Dedicated
BY THE AUTHOR,
WHO OWES MORE THAN HE CAN EVER ACKNOWLEDGE OR FORGET
TO HER AND HERS.
PREFACE
TO THE SIXTH EDITION.
I RECEIVED the following letter from an old friend soon after the last
edition of this book was published, and resolved, if ever another
edition were called for, to print it. For it is clear from this and
other like comments, that something more should have been said expressly
on the subject of bullying, and how it is to be met.
"MY DEAR ----,
"I blame myself for not having earlier suggested
whether you could not, in another edition of Tom
Brown, or another story, denounce more decidedly
the evils of _bullying_ at schools. You have
indeed done so, and in the best way, by making
Flashman the bully the most contemptible
character; but in that scene of the _tossing_, and
similar passages, you hardly suggest that such
things should be stopped--and do not suggest any
means of putting an end to them.
"This subject has been on my mind for years. It
fills me with grief and misery to think what weak
and nervous children go through at school--how
their health and character for life are destroyed
by rough and brutal treatment.
"It was some comfort to be under the old delusion
that fear and nervousness can be cured by
violence, and that knocking about will turn a
timid boy into a bold one. But now we know well
enough that is not true. Gradually training a
timid child to do bold acts would be most
desirable; but _frightening_ him and ill-treating
him will not make him courageous. Every medical
man knows the fatal effects of terror, or
agitation, or excitement, to nerves that are
over-sensitive. There are different kinds of
courage, as you have shown in your character of
Arthur.
"A boy may have moral courage, and a
finely-organized brain and nervous system. Such a
boy is calculated, if judiciously educated, to be
a great, wise, and useful man; but he may not
possess _animal courage_; and one night's
_tossing_, or bullying, may produce such an injury
to his brain and nerves that his usefulness is
spoiled for life. I verily believe that hundreds
of noble organizations are thus destroyed every
year. Horse-jockeys have learnt to be wiser; they
know that a highly nervous horse is utterly
destroyed by harshness. A groom who tried to cure
a shying horse by roughness and violence, would be
discharged as a brute and a fool. A man who would
regulate his watch with a crowbar would be
considered an ass. But the person who thinks a
child of delicate and nervous organization can be
made bold by bullying is no better.
"He can be made bold by _healthy exercise_ and
_games_ and _sports_; but that is quite a
different thing. And even these games and sports
should bear some proportion to his strength and
capacities.
"I very much doubt whether small children should
play with big ones--the rush of a set of great
fellows at football, or the speed of a
cricket-ball sent by a strong hitter, must be very
alarming to a mere child, to a child who might
stand up boldly enough among children of his own
size and height.
"Look at half-a-dozen small children playing
cricket by themselves; how feeble are their blows,
how slowly they bowl. You can measure in that way
their capacity.
"Tom Brown and his eleven were bold enough playing
against an eleven of about their own calibre; but
I suspect they would have been in a precious funk
if they had played against eleven giants, whose
bowling bore the same proportion to theirs that
theirs does to the small children's above.
"To return to the _tossing_. I must say I think
some means might be devised to enable school-boys
to go to bed in quietness and peace--and that some
means ought to be devised and enforced. No good,
moral or physical, to those who bully or those who
are bullied, can ensue from such scenes as take
place in the dormitories of schools. I suspect
that British wisdom and ingenuity are sufficient
to discover a remedy for this evil, if directed in
the right direction.
"The fact is, that the condition of a small boy at
a large school is one of peculiar hardship and
suffering. He is entirely at the mercy of
proverbially the roughest things in the
universe--great school-boys; and he is deprived of
the protection which the weak have in civilized
society; for he may not complain; if he does, he
is an outlaw--he has no protector but public
opinion, and that a public opinion of the very
lowest grade, the opinion of rude and ignorant
boys.
"What do school-boys know of those deep questions
of moral and physical philosophy, of the anatomy
of mind and body, by which the treatment of a
child should be regulated?
"Why should the laws of civilization be suspended
for schools? Why should boys be left to herd
together with no law but that of force or cunning?
What would become of society if it were
constituted on the same principles? It would be
plunged into anarchy in a week.
"One of our judges, not long ago, refused to
extend the protection of the law to a child who
had been ill-treated at school. If a party of
navvies had given _him_ a licking, and he had
brought the case before a magistrate, what would
he have thought if the magistrate had refused to
protect him, on the ground that if such cases were
brought before him he might have fifty a-day from
one town only?
"Now I agree with you that a constant supervision
of the master is not desirable or possible--and
that telling tales, or constantly referring to the
master for protection, would only produce ill-will
and worse treatment.
"If I rightly understand your book, it is an
effort to improve the condition of schools by
improving the tone of morality and public opinion
in them. But your book contains the most
indubitable proofs that the condition of the
younger boys at public schools, except under the
rare dictatorship of an Old Brooke, is one of
great hardship and suffering.
"A timid and nervous boy is from morning till
night in a state of bodily fear. He is constantly
tormented when trying to learn his lessons. His
play-hours are occupied in fagging, in a horrid
funk of cricket-balls and footballs, and the
violent sport of creatures who, to him, are
giants. He goes to his bed in fear and
trembling,--worse than the reality of the rough
treatment to which he is perhaps subjected.
"I believe there is only one complete remedy. It
is not in magisterial supervision; nor in telling
tales; nor in raising the tone of public opinion
among school-boys--but in the _separation of boys_
of _different ages into different schools_.
"There should be at least _three_ different
classes of schools--the first for boys from nine
to twelve; the second for boys from twelve to
fifteen; the third for those above fifteen. And
these schools should be in different localities.
"There ought to be a certain amount of supervision
by the master at those times when there are
special occasions for bullying, _e.g._ in the long
winter evenings, and when the boys are congregated
together in the bedrooms. Surely it cannot be an
impossibility to keep order, and protect the weak
at such times. Whatever evils might arise from
supervision, they could hardly be greater than
those produced by a system which divides boys into
despots and slaves.
"Ever yours, very truly,
F.D."
The question of how to adapt English public school education to nervous
and sensitive boys (often the highest and noblest subjects which that
education has to deal with) ought to be looked at from every point of
view.[A] I therefore add a few extracts from the letter of an old friend
and school-fellow, than whom no man in England is better able to speak
on the subject:--
"What's the use of sorting the boys by ages,
unless you do so by strength: and who are often
the real bullies? The strong young dog of
fourteen, while the victim may be one year or two
years older.... I deny the fact about the
bedrooms: there is trouble at times, and always
will be; but so there is in nurseries;--my little
girl, who looks like an angel, was bullying the
smallest twice to-day.
"Bullying must be fought with in other ways,--by
getting not only the Sixth to put it down, but the
lower fellows to scorn it, and by eradicating
mercilessly the incorrigible; and a master who
really cares for his fellows is pretty sure to
know instinctively who in his house are likely to
be bullied, and, knowing a fellow to be really
victimised and harassed, I am sure that he can
stop it if he is resolved. There are many kinds of
annoyance--sometimes of real cutting persecution
for righteousness' sake--that he can't stop; no
more could all the ushers in the world; but he can
do very much in many ways to make the shafts of
the wicked pointless.
"But though, for quite other reasons, I don't like
to see very young boys launched at a public
school, and though I don't deny (I wish I could)
the existence from time to time of bullying, I
deny its being a constant condition of school
life, and still more, the possibility of meeting
it by the means proposed...."
"I don't wish to understate the amount of bullying
that goes on, but my conviction is that it must be
fought, like all school evils, but it more than
any, by _dynamics_ rather than _mechanics_, by
getting the fellows to respect themselves and one
another, rather than by sitting by them with a
thick stick."
And now, having broken my resolution never to write a Preface, there are
just two or three things which I should like to say a word about.
Several persons, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, while
saying very kind things about this book, have added, that the great
fault of it is, "too much preaching;" but they hope I shall amend in
this matter should I ever write again. Now this I most distinctly
decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the
chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his
bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will
spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to
amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn't do so myself.
The fact is, that I can scarcely ever call on one of my contemporaries
now-a-days without running across a boy already at school, or just ready
to go there, whose bright looks and supple limbs remind me of his
father, and out first meeting in old times. I can scarcely keep the
Latin Grammar out of my own house any longer; and the sight of sons,
nephews, and godsons, playing trap-bat-and-ball, and reading "Robinson
Crusoe," makes one ask oneself, whether there isn't something one would
like to say to them before they take their first plunge into the stream
of life, away from their own homes, or while they are yet shivering
after the first plunge. My sole object in writing was to preach to boys:
if ever I write again, it will be to preach to some other age. I can't
see that a man has any business to write at all unless he has something
which he thoroughly believes and wants to preach about. If he has this,
and the chance of delivering himself of it, let him by all means put it
in the shape in which it will be most likely to get a hearing; but let
him never be so carried away as to forget that preaching is his object.
A black soldier, in a West Indian regiment, tied up to receive a couple
of dozen, for drunkenness, cried out to his captain, who was exhorting
him to sobriety in future, "Cap'n, if you preachee, preachee; and if
floggee, floggee; but no preachee and floggee too!" to which his captain
might have replied, "No, Pompey, I must preach whenever I see a chance
of being listened to, which I never did before; so now you must have it
all together; and I hope you may remember some of it."
There is one point which has been made by several of the Reviewers who
have noticed this book, and it is one which, as I am writing a Preface,
I cannot pass over. They have stated that the Rugby undergraduates they
remember at the Universities were "a solemn array," "boys turned into
men before their time," "a semi-political, semi-sacerdotal fraternity,"
&c., giving the idea that Arnold turned out a set of young square-toes,
who wore long-fingered black gloves and talked with a snuffle. I can
only say that their acquaintance must have been limited and exceptional.
For I am sure that every one who has had anything like large or
continuous knowledge of boys brought up at Rugby from the times of which
this book treats down to this day, will bear me out in saying, that the
mark by which you may know them, is, their genial and hearty freshness
and youthfulness of character. They lose nothing of the boy that is
worth keeping, but build up the man upon it. This is their _differentia_
as Rugby boys; and if they never had it, or have lost it, it must be,
not because they were at Rugby, but in spite of their having been there;
the stronger it is in them the more deeply you may be sure have they
drunk of the spirit of their school.
But this boyishness in the highest sense is not incompatible with
seriousness,--or earnestness, if you like the word better.[B] Quite the
contrary. And I can well believe that casual observers, who have never
been intimate with Rugby boys of the true stamp, but have met them only
in the every-day society of the Universities, at wines,
breakfast-parties, and the like, may have seen a good deal more of the
serious or earnest side of their characters than of any other. For the
more the boy was alive in them the less will they have been able to
conceal their thoughts, or their opinion of what was taking place under
their noses; and if the greater part of that didn't square with their
notions of what was right, very likely they showed pretty clearly that
it did not, at whatever risk of being taken for young prigs. They may be
open to the charge of having old heads on young shoulders; I think they
are, and always were, as long as I can remember; but so long as they
have young hearts to keep head and shoulders in order, I, for one, must
think this only a gain.
And what gave Rugby boys this character, and has enabled the School, I
believe, to keep it to this day? I say fearlessly,--Arnold's teaching
and example--above all, that part of it which has been, I will not say
sneered at, but certainly not approved--his unwearied zeal in creating
"moral thoughtfulness" in every boy with whom he came into personal
contact.
He certainly _did_ teach us--thank God for it!--that we could not cut
our life into slices and say, "In this slice your actions are
indifferent, and you needn't trouble your heads about them one way or
another; but in this slice mind what you are about, for they are
important"--a pretty muddle we should have been in had he done so. He
taught us that in this wonderful world, no boy or man can tell which of
his actions is indifferent and which not; that by a thoughtless word or
look we may lead astray a brother for whom Christ died. He taught us
that life is a whole, made up of actions and thoughts and longings,
great and small, noble and ignoble; therefore the only true wisdom for
boy or man is to bring the whole life into obedience to Him whose world
we live in, and who has purchased us with His blood; and that whether we
eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, we are to do all in His name and to
His glory; in such teaching, faithfully, as it seems to me, following
that of Paul of Tarsus, who was in the habit of meaning what he said,
and who laid down this standard for every man and boy in his time. I
think it lies with those who say that such teaching will not do for us
now, to show why a teacher in the nineteenth century is to preach a
lower standard than one in the first.
However, I won't say that the Reviewers have not a certain plausible
ground for their dicta. For a short time after a boy has taken up such a
life as Arnold would have urged upon him, he has a hard time of it. He
finds his judgment often at fault, his body and intellect running away
with him into all sorts of pitfalls, and himself coming down with a
crash. The more seriously he buckles to his work the oftener these
mischances seem to happen; and in the dust of his tumbles and struggles,
unless he is a very extraordinary boy, he may often be too severe on his
comrades, may think he sees evil in things innocent, may give offence
when he never meant it. At this stage of his career, I take it, our
Reviewer comes across him, and, not looking below the surface (as a
Reviewer ought to do), at once sets the poor boy down for a prig and a
Pharisee, when in all likelihood he is one of the humblest and truest
and most childlike of the Reviewer's acquaintance.
But let our Reviewer come across him again in a year or two, when the
"thoughtful life" has become habitual to him, and fits him as easily as
his skin; and, if he be honest, I think he will see cause to reconsider
his judgment. For he will find the boy, grown into a man, enjoying
every-day life as no man can who has not found out whence comes the
capacity for enjoyment, and who is the Giver of the least of the good
things of this world--humble, as no man can be who has not proved his
own powerlessness to do right in the smallest act which he ever had to
do--tolerant, as no man can be who does not live daily and hourly in the
knowledge of how Perfect Love is for ever about his path, and bearing
with and upholding him.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] For those who believe with me in public school education, the fact
stated in the following extract from a note of Mr. G. De Bunsen, will be
hailed with pleasure, especially now that our alliance with Prussia (the
most natural and healthy European alliance for Protestant England) is
likely to be so much stronger and deeper than heretofore. Speaking of
this hook, he says,--"The author is mistaken in saying the public
schools, in the English sense, are peculiar to England. Schul Pforte (in
the Prussian province of Saxony) is similar in antiquity and
institutions. I like his book all the more for having been there for
five years."
[B] "To him (Arnold) and his admirers we owe the substitution of the
word 'earnest' for its predecessor 'serious'"--_Edinburgh Review_, No.
217, p. 183.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
THE BROWN FAMILY 1
CHAPTER II.
THE VEAST 21
CHAPTER III.
SUNDRY WARS AND ALLIANCES 44
CHAPTER IV.
THE STAGE COACH 68
CHAPTER V.
RUGBY AND FOOTBALL 87
CHAPTER VI.
AFTER THE MATCH 112
CHAPTER VII.
SETTLING TO THE COLLAR 134
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 158
CHAPTER IX.
A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS 184
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
HOW THE TIDE TURNED 213
CHAPTER II.
THE NEW BOY 228
CHAPTER III.
ARTHUR MAKES A FRIEND 245
CHAPTER IV.
THE BIRD-FANCIERS 262
CHAPTER V.
THE FIGHT 279
CHAPTER VI.
THE FEVER 300
CHAPTER VII.
HARRY EAST'S DILEMMAS AND DELIVERANCES 321
CHAPTER VIII.
TOM BROWN'S LAST MATCH 341
CHAPTER IX.
FINIS 367
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
THE NIGHT FAG 144
OLD THOMAS IN HIS DEN 155
TOM DISCOVERED BY VELVETEENS 202
CLIMBING THE FIR-TREE AFTER THE KESTREL'S NEST 268
THE DOCTOR'S COUNSEL TO YOUNG BROOKE 296
THE CONVERSATION DURING THE MATCH 351
CHAIRING TOM IN THE QUADRANGLE 366
TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS.
BY AN OLD BOY.
CHAPTER I.
"I'm the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir,
With liberal notions under my cap."
_Ballad._
THE Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the
pencil of Doyle within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now
matriculating at the Universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but
late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with
the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the
British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness
it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun
way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and
leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever
the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of
the Browns have done yeoman's work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard
shaft at Cressy and Agincourt--with the brown bill and pike under the
brave Lord Willoughby--with culverin and demi-culverin against Spaniards
and Dutchmen--with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket and bayonet, under
Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they
have carried their lives in their hands; getting hard knocks and hard
work in plenty, which was on the whole what they looked for, and the
best thing for them; and little praise or pudding, which indeed they and
most of us are better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and
such-like folk, have led armies, and made laws time out of mind; but
those noble families would be somewhat astounded--if the accounts ever
came to be fairly taken--to find how small their work for England has
been by the side of that of the Browns.
These latter, indeed, have until the present generation rarely been sung
by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their "sacer vates,"
having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having
been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding on
tight to, whatever good things happened to be going,--the foundation of
the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way,
and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs,
seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer having for
many years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and moreover
having the honour of being nearly connected with an eminently
respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in
him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone on to the pile.
However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you
should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so
bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have to meet and put
up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear
at once what sort of folk the Browns are, at least my branch of them;
and then if you don't like the sort, why, cut the concern at once, and
let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other.
In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question
their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no
question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are
going, there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcase. And
these carcases for the most part answer very well to the characteristic
propensity; they are a square-headed and snake-necked generation, broad
in the shoulder, deep in the chest and thin in the flank, carrying no
lumber. Then for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing
the belief they have in one another. With them there is nothing like the
Browns, to the third and fourth generation. "Blood is thicker than
water," is one of their pet sayings. They can't be happy unless they
are always meeting one another. Never were such people for family
gatherings, which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think
had better not have been gathered together. For during the whole time of
their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds
on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are wonderfully
antagonist, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till you've
been among them some time and understand them, you can't think but that
they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it; they love and respect one another
ten times the more after a good set family arguing bout, and go back,
one to his curacy, another to his chambers, and another to his regiment,
freshened for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the
height of company.
This family training too, combined with their turn for combativeness,
makes them eminently quixotic. They can't let anything alone which they
think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoying all
easy-going folk; and spend their time and money in having a tinker at
it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave
the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile. Most other
folk get tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white
whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old
age. They have always a crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe
reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are.
And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up or make
them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the
right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck's back
feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one
week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he
goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they
will be on the look-out for Bill to take his place.
However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular;
so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole
empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take
to be the chief cause of that empire's stability, let us at once fix our
attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched,
and which dwelt in that portion of the royal county of Berks which is
called the Vale of White Horse.
Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as
far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open, have been
aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a fine range of chalk
hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go
down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line.
The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come
in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you love
English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can't do better, the
next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon road or Shrivenham
station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for
the vague old stories that haunt country sides all about England, will
not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours' stay; for,
glorious as the view is the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for
its relics of bygone times. I only know two English neighbourhoods
thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough
of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe
this to be the case almost throughout the country; but each has a
special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of
and going to introduce you to very particularly; for on this subject I
must be prosy; so those that don't care for England in detail may skip
the chapter.
O young England! young England! You who are born into these racing
railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight,
every year; and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground
for three pound ten, in a five weeks' holiday; why don't you know more
of your own birthplaces? You're all in the ends of the earth, it seems
to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for
midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not. Going round Ireland,
with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson
on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford
racing-boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the
steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by
the last batch of books from Mudie's library, and half bored to death.
Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or
less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and
have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high
art, and all that; have seen the pictures at Dresden and the Louvre, and
know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own
lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be chock-full of science, not
one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis
which grows in the next wood or on the down three miles off, or what the
bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the
stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last
skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood,
where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid
by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.
Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach which put us down at
the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had
been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce Domum" at the top
of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We
had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or ride of home. And so
we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and
stories by heart; and went over the fields, and woods, and hills, again
and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or
Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys, and you're young cosmopolites,
belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it's all right--I
dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity,
and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of
White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away
Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.
But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the
first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said,
the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large
rich pastures, bounded by fox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow
timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where
abideth poor Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself
for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the
Old Berkshire. Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know
how he and the stanch little pack who dash after him--heads high and
sterns low with a breast-high scent--can consume the ground at such
times. There being little plough-land and few woods, the vale is only an
average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are
straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down
without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners by the
sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden.
They are built chiefly of good grey stone, and thatched; though I see
that within the last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying,
for the vale is beginning to manufacture largely both brick and tiles.
There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every
village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and
ganders of the people; and these roads are old-fashioned homely roads,
very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still
pleasant jog-trot roads running through the great pasture lands, dotted
here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are
feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of
each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and
gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.
One of the moralists whom we sat under in my youth,--was it the great
Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins?--says, "We are born in a vale, and
must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These
consequences, I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who
weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a vale--that
is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill _always_ in
view, if you choose to turn towards him, that's the essence of a vale.
There he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion; you
never lose him as you do in hilly districts.
And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There stands right up
above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest,
bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the
top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder
and think it odd you never heard of this before; but, wonder or not, as
you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which
wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a
magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates, and ditch, and
mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old
rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say
you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land,
some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't
bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyry. The ground falls
away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world?
You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is
delicious. There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and
here it lies just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east
side left by her Majesty's corps of Sappers and Miners the other day,
when they and the Engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and
their surveys for the Ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a
place that you won't forget--a place to open a man's soul and make him
prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden
of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind;
and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance
along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway"
("the Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the
highest back of the hills;--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and
told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he
could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who
abide there.
And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on the
Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen,
more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie
whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great
battle, the battle of Ashdown ("Æscendum" in the chroniclers), which
broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes
held the camp and the slope where we are standing--the whole crown of
the hill, in fact. "The heathen had beforehand seized the higher
ground," as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from
London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair vale, Alfred's
own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they
did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the lower
ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree,
marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have
seen)." Bless the old chronicler! does he think nobody ever saw the
"single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day,
just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since; an
old single thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At least if it isn't the
same tree, it ought to have been, for it's just in the place where the
battle must have been won or lost--"around which, as I was saying, the
two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in
this place, one of the two kings of the heathen, and five of his earls
fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same
place."[C] After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might
never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the country side, carved out
on the northern side of the chalk hill, under the camp, where it is
almost precipitous, the great Saxon white horse, which he who will may
see from the railway, and which gives its name to the vale, over which
it has looked these thousand years and more.
Right down below the White Horse is a curious deep and broad gulley
called "the Manger," into one side of which the hills fall with a series
of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs;" they
are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere
else, with their short green turf, and tender blue-bells, and gossamer
and thistle-down gleaming in the sun, and the sheep-paths running along
their sides like ruled lines.
The other side of the Manger is formed by the Dragon's Hill, a curious
little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward from the range, and
utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some deliverer of
mankind, St. George, the country folks used to tell me, killed a dragon.
Whether it were St. George, I cannot say; but surely a dragon was killed
there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more
by token the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hillside.
Passing along the Ridgeway to the west for about a mile, we come to a
little clump of young beech and firs, with a growth of thorn and privet
underwood. Here you may find nests of the strong down partridge and
peewit, but take care that the keeper isn't down upon you; and in the
middle of it is an old cromlech, a huge flat stone raised on seven or
eight others, and led up to by a path, with large single stones set up
on each side. This is Wayland Smith's cave, a place of classic fame now;
but as Sir Walter has touched it, I may as well let it alone, and refer
you to "Kenilworth" for the legend.
The thick deep wood which you see in the hollow about a mile off,
surrounds Ashdown Park, built by Inigo Jones. Four broad alleys are cut
through the wood from circumference to centre, and each leads to one
face of the house. The mystery of the downs hangs about house and wood,
as they stand there alone, so unlike all around, with the green slopes
studded with great stones just about this part, stretching away on all
sides. It was a wise Lord Craven, I think, who pitched his tent there.
Passing along the Ridgeway to the east, we soon come to cultivated land.
The downs, strictly so called, are no more; Lincolnshire farmers have
been imported, and the long fresh slopes are sheep-walks no more, but
grow famous turnips and barley. One of those improvers lives over there
at the "Seven Barrows" farm, another mystery of the great downs. There
are the barrows still, solemn and silent, like ships in the calm sea,
the sepulchres of some sons of men. But of whom? It is three miles from
the White Horse, too far for the slain of Ashdown to be buried
there--who shall say what heroes are waiting there? But we must get down
into the vale again, and so away by the Great Western Railway to town,
for time and the printer's devil press, and it is a terrible long and
slippery descent, and a shocking bad road. At the bottom, however, there
is a pleasant public, whereat we must really take a modest quencher, for
the down here is a provocative of thirst. So we pull up under an old oak
which stands before the door.
"What is the name of your hill, landlord?"
"Blawing STWUN Hill, sir, to be sure."
[Reader. "_Sturm?_"
AUTHOR. "_Stone_, stupid--the Blowing _Stone_."]
"And of your house? I can't make out the sign."
"Blawing Stwun, sir," says the landlord, pouring out his old ale from a
Toby-Philpot jug, with a melodious crash, into the long-necked glass.
"What queer names!" say we, sighing at the end of our draught, and
holding out the glass to be replenished.
"Be'an't queer at all, as I can see, sir," says mine host, handing back
our glass, "seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun his self," putting
his hand on a square lump of stone some three feet and a half high,
perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian
rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We
are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale wondering
what will come next. "Like to hear un, sir?" says mine host, setting
down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the "Stwun." We
are ready for anything; and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his
mouth to one of the rat-holes. Something must come of it, if he doesn't
burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here
it comes, sure enough, a grewsome sound between a moan and a roar, and
spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the
woods at the back of the house--a ghost-like, awful voice. "Um do say,
sir," says mine host rising purple-faced, while the moan is still coming
out of the "Stwun," "as they used in old times to warn the country-side,
by blawing the stwun when the enemy was acomin'--and as how folks could
make un heered them for seven mile round; leastways, so I've heered
Lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about them old times." We
can hardly swallow Lawyer Smith's seven miles; but could the blowing of
the stone have been a summons, a sort of sending the fiery cross round
the neighbourhood in the old times? What old times? Who knows? We pay
for our beer, and are thankful.
"And what's the name of the village just below, landlord?"
"Kingstone Lisle, sir."
"Fine plantations you've got 'ere?"
"Yes, sir, the Squire's 'mazin' fond of trees and such like."
"No wonder. He's got some real beauties to be fond of. Good day,
landlord."
"Good day, sir, and a pleasant ride to 'e."
And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for readers, have you had
enough? Will you give in at once, and say you're convinced, and let me
begin my story, or will you have more of it? Remember, I've only been
over a little bit of the hillside yet--what you could ride round easily
on your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the vale, by
Blowing Stone Hill, and if I once begin about the vale, what's to stop
me? You'll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and
Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles the First (the vale was
near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant; full of Throgmortons, Puseys, and
Pyes, and such like, and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read
Thomas Ingoldsby's "Legend of Hamilton Tighe?" If you haven't you ought
to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived before he went to sea; his
real name was Hampden Pye, and the Pyes were the great folk at
Farringdon. Then there's Pusey, you've heard of the Pusey horn, which
King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old
squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders turned out
of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to
his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire
nights. And the splendid old cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas
town;--the whole country-side teems with Saxon names and memories! And
the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside,
where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright waterlilies in the
moat, and its yew walk, "the cloister walk," and its peerless terraced
gardens. There they all are, and twenty things besides; for those who
care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things you may
find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English country
neighbourhood.
Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well,
well; I've done what I can to make you, and if you will go gadding over
half Europe now every holidays, I can't help it. I was born and bred a
west-countryman, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon
kingdom of Wessex, a regular, "Angular Saxon," the very soul of me
"adscriptus glebe." There's nothing like the old country-side for me,
and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it
fresh from the veritable chaw in the White Horse Vale: and I say with
"Gaarge Ridler," the old west-country yeoman,
"Throo aall the waarld owld Gaarge would bwoast,
Commend me to merry owld England mwoast:
While vools gwoes prating vur and nigh,
We stwops at whum, my dog and I."
Here at any rate lived and stopped at home, Squire Brown, J.P. for the
county of Berks, in a village near the foot of the White Horse range.
And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and begat sons
and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the
roads and the times. And his wife dealt out stockings, and calico
shirts, and smock frocks, and comforting drinks to the old folks with
the "rheumatiz." and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes
clubs going, for yule tide; when the bands of mummers came round,
dressed out in ribbons and coloured paper caps, and stamped round the
Squire's kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular the legend of
St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound Doctor, who plays his part
at healing the Saint--a relic, I believe, of the old middle-age
mysteries. It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the
eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse
to witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest
child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the
family characteristics in great strength. He was a hearty strong boy
from the first, given to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and
fraternizing with all the village boys, with whom he made expeditions
all round the neighbourhood. And here in the quiet old-fashioned
country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills, Tom Brown
was reared, and never left it till he went first to school when nearly
eight years of age,--for in those days change of air twice a year was
not thought absolutely necessary for the health of all Her Majesty's
lieges.
I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the
various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies, those gigantic jobbers
and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed together
some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body
and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which
they continually distribute judiciously amongst the Doctors, stipulating
only this one thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every
patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see
their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that
none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty
years ago,--not a bit of it. The Browns didn't go out of the county once
in five years. A visit to Reading or Abingdon twice a-year, at Assizes
or Quarter Sessions, which the Squire made on his horse with a pair of
saddle-bags containing his wardrobe--a stay of a day or two at some
country neighbour's--or an expedition to a county ball, or the yeomanry
review--made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray
Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then; or from
Oxford, on grave nag, an old don, contemporary of the Squire; and were
looked upon by the Brown household and the villagers with the same sort
of feeling with which we now regard a man who has crossed the Rocky
Mountains, or launched a boat on the Great Lake in Central Africa. The
White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road; nothing but
country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and
this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the
Vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't seem
to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the
country side with coal, and up and down which continually went the long
barges, with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along
the towing path, and the women in bright coloured handkerchiefs standing
in the sterns steering. Standing I say, but you could never see whether
they were standing or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being
out of sight in the cozy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of
the stern, and which Tom Brown pictured to himself as the most desirable
of residences. His nurse told him that those good-natured-looking women
were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges and
taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn't believe,
and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the
oft-proffered invitation of these sirens to "young Master," to come in
and have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.
Yet why should I after all abuse the gadabout propensities of my
countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now; that's certain, for better for
worse. I am a vagabond; I have been away from home no less than five
distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example--we are
moving on from top to bottom. Little dirty Jack, who abides in
Clement's Inn gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his
month's hop-picking every year as a matter of course. Why shouldn't he?
I'm delighted at it. I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich
ones;--couriers and ladies' maids, imperials and travelling carriages,
are an abomination unto me--I cannot away with them. But for dirty Jack,
and every good fellow who, in the words of the capital French song,
moves about,
"Comme le limaçon,
Portant tout son bagage,
Ses meubles, sa maison,"
on his own back, why, good luck to them, and many a merry road-side
adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney corners of road-side inns,
Swiss châlets, Hottentot kraals, or wherever else they like to go. So
having succeeded in contradicting myself in my first chapter, (which
gives me great hopes that you will all go on, and think me a good fellow
notwithstanding my crotchet,) I shall here shut up for the present, and
consider my ways; having resolved to "sar' it out," as we say in the
Vale, "holus-bolus" just as it comes, and then you'll probably get the
truth out of me.
FOOTNOTE:
[C] "Pagani editiorem locum præoccupaverant. Christiani ab inferiori
loco aciem dirigebant. Erat quoque in eodem loco unica spinosa arbor,
brevis admodum (quam nos ipsi nostris propriis oculis vidimus). Circa
quam ergo hostiles inter se acies cum ingenti clamore hostiliter
conveniunt. Quo in loco alter de duobus Paganorum regibus et quinque
comites occisi occubuerunt, et multa millia Paganæ partis in eodem loco.
Cecidit illic ergo Boegsceg Rex, et Sidroc ille senex comes, et Sidroc
Junior comes, et Obsbern comes," &c.--_Annales Rerum Gestarum Ælfredi
Magni, Auctore Asserio. Recensuit Franciscus Wise. Oxford_, 1722, p. 23.