genially entertained the abuse of a drunken tramp who was accusing us
all of luxury, laziness, and a longing to run down our fellowmen, my
thoughts turned wistfully to Lichfield, lying due south, to whose
"Queen of English Minsters" we were ashamed to present our modern
hippogriff. I remembered waking there one autumnal morning, years ago,
at the famous old inn of the Swan, and peering from my window to see
that wooden bird, directly beneath it, flapping in a rainy gale. The
cathedral rose before the mental vision,--the grace of its three
spires; its wonderful west front with tiers of saints and prophets and
archangels, "a very Te Deum in stone"; the delicate harmonies of
colour and line within; the glowing windows of the Lady Chapel; the
"heaven-loved innocence" of the two little sisters sculptured by
Chantrey, and his kneeling effigy of a bishop so benignant even in
marble that a passing child slipped from her mother's hand and knelt
beside him to say her baby prayers. What books had been shown me there
in that quiet library above the chapter-house! I could still recall
the richly illuminated manuscript of the "Canterbury Tales," a volume
of Dr. South's sermons with Dr. Johnson's rough, vigorous pencil-marks
all up and down the margins, and, treasure of treasures, an
eighth-century manuscript of St. Chad's Gospels. For this is St.
Chad's cathedral, still his, though the successive churches erected on
this site have passed like human generations, each building itself
into the next.
St. Chad, hermit and bishop, came from Ireland as an apostle to Mercia
in the seventh century. Among his first converts were the king's two
sons, martyred for their faith. Even in these far distant days his
tradition is revered, and on Holy Thursday the choristers of the
cathedral yet go in procession to St. Chad's Well, bearing green
boughs and chanting. A century or so ago, the well was adorned with
bright garlands for this festival. The boy Addison, whose father was
Dean of Lichfield, may have gathered daffodils and primroses to give
to good St. Chad.
The ancient city has other memories. Farquhar set the scene of his
"Beaux' Stratagem" there. Major André knew those shaded walks. In the
south transept of the cathedral is the sepulchre of Garrick, whose
death, the inscription tells us, "eclipsed the gaiety of nations and
impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." It may be
recalled that Hawthorne found it "really pleasant" to meet Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu's tomb in the minster, and that Scott asserts there
used to be, in "moated Lichfield's lofty pile," a monument to Marmion,
whose castle stood a few miles to the southeast, at Tamworth.
But the motor-car, full-fed with gasoline, would brook no further
pause. As self-important as John Hobs, the famous Tanner of Tamworth
whom "not to know was to know nobody," it stormed through Uttoxeter
and on, outsmelling the breweries of Burton-on-Trent. Ducks, hens,
cats, dogs, babies, the aged and infirm, the halt and the blind,
scuttled to left and right. Policemen glared out at it from their
"motor-traps" in the hedges. A group of small boys sent a rattle of
stones against it. Rocester! Only three miles away were the ruins of
the Cistercian Abbey of Croxden. We would have liked to see them, if
only to investigate the story that the heart of King John is buried
there, for we had never before heard that he had a heart; but while we
were voicing our desire we had already crossed the Dove and whizzed
into Derbyshire.
Dovedale was our goal. This beautiful border district of Derby and
Staffordshire abounds in literary associations. Near Ilam Hall, whose
grounds are said to have suggested to Dr. Johnson the "happy valley"
in "Rasselas," and in whose grotto Congreve wrote his "Old Bachelor,"
stands the famous Isaak Walton Inn. The patron saint of the region is
the Gentle Angler, who in these "flowery meads" and by these "crystal
streams" loved to
"see a black-bird feed her young,
Or a laverock build her nest."
Here he would raise his
"low-pitched thoughts above
Earth, or what poor mortals love."
On a stone at the source of the Dove, and again on the Fishing-House
which has stood since 1674 "Piscatoribus sacrum," his initials are
interlaced with those of his friend and fellow-fisherman Charles
Cotton, the patron sinner of the locality. In Beresford Dale may be
found the little cave where this gay and thriftless gentleman, author
of the second part of "The Complete Angler," used to hide from his
creditors. At Wootton Hall Jean Jacques Rousseau once resided for over
a year, writing on his "Confessions" and amusing himself scattering
through Dovedale the seeds of many of the mountain plants of France.
In a cottage at Church Mayfield, Moore wrote his "Lalla Rookh," and
near Colwich Abbey once stood the house in which Handel composed much
of the "Messiah."
We did not see any of these spots. The automobile would none of them.
It whisked about giddily half an hour, ramping into the wrong shrines
and out again, disconcerting a herd of deer and a pack of young
fox-hounds, and then impetuously bolted back to Uttoxeter. There were
antiquities all along the way,--British barrows, Roman camps, mediæval
churches, Elizabethan mansions,--but the dusty and odoriferous trail
of our car was flung impartially over them all.
We shot through Uttoxeter and went whirring on. A glimpse of the
hillside ruins of Chartley Castle brought a fleeting sorrow for Mary
Queen of Scots. It was one of those many prisons that she knew in the
bitter years between Cockermouth and Fotheringay,--the years that
whitened her bright hair and twisted her with cruel rheumatism. She
was harried from Carlisle in Cumberland to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire,
and thence sent to Tutbury, on the Derby side of the Dove, in custody
of the unlucky Earl of Shrewsbury and his keen-eyed, shrewish-tongued
dame, Bess of Hardwick. But still the poor queen was shifted from one
stronghold to another. Yorkshire meted out to her Elizabeth's harsh
hospitality at Sheffield, Warwickshire at Coventry, Leicestershire at
Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Derbyshire at Wingfield Manor and Chatsworth and
Hardwick Hall, even at Buxton, where she was occasionally allowed to
go for the baths, and Staffordshire at Tixall and here at Chartley. It
was while she was at Chartley, with Sir Amyas Paulet for her jailer,
that the famous Babington conspiracy was hatched, and anything but an
automobile would have stopped and searched for that stone wall in
which a brewer's boy deposited the incriminating letters, read and
copied every one by Walsingham before they reached the captive.
At Weston we jumped the Trent again and pounded on to Stafford, the
shoemakers' town, where we came near knocking two bicyclists into a
ditch. They were plain-spoken young men, and, addressing themselves to
the chauffeur, they expressed an unfavourable opinion of his
character. Stafford lies half-way between the two coal-fields of the
county. Directly south some fifteen miles is Wolverhampton, the
capital of the iron-manufacturing district. We remembered that
Stafford was the birthplace of Isaak Walton, but it was too late to
gain access to the old Church of St. Mary's, which has his bust in
marble and, to boot, the strangest font in England. We climbed the
toilsome heights of Stafford Castle for the view it was too dark to
see, and then once more delivered ourselves over to the champing
monster, which spun us back to Shrewsbury through a weird, infernal
world flaring with tongues of fire.
THE HEART OF ENGLAND--WARWICKSHIRE
A few miles to the northwest of Coventry lies the village of Meriden,
which is called the centre of England. There on a tableland is a
little pool from which the water flows both west and east, on the one
side reaching the Severn and the British Channel, on the other the
Trent and the North Sea. "Leafy Warwickshire" is watered, as all the
world knows, by the Avon. The county, though its borders show here and
there a hilly fringe, and though the spurs of the Cotswolds invade it
on the south, is in the main a fertile river-basin, given over to
agriculture and to pasturage. The forest of Arden, that once covered
the Midlands, is still suggested by rich-timbered parks and giant
trees of ancient memory. On the north, Warwickshire tapers up into the
Staffordshire coal-fields and puts on a manufacturing character. The
great town of this district is Birmingham, capital of the hardware
industries.
It was from Birmingham that we started out on our Warwickshire trip.
We had but a hasty impression of a well-built, prosperous, purposeful
town, but if we had known at the time what masterpieces of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were to be seen in the Art Gallery we would
have taken a later train than we did for Nuneaton. Here we bade
farewell to railways, having decided to "post" through the county. Our
automobile scamper across Staffordshire had left us with a conviction
that this mode of travel was neither democratic nor becoming,--least
of all adapted to a literary pilgrimage. We preferred to drive
ourselves, but the English hostlers, shaking their stolid heads,
preferred that we should be driven. It was only by a lucky chance that
we had found, in the Lake Country, a broad-minded butcher who would
trust us on short expeditions with "Toby" and a pony-cart. After all,
it is easier to adapt yourself to foreign ways than to adapt them to
you, and the old, traditional, respectable method of travel in England
is by post. The regular rate for a victoria--which carries light
luggage--and a single horse is a shilling a mile, with no charge for
return, but with a considerable tip to the driver. In out-of-the-way
places the rate was sometimes only ninepence a mile, but in the
regions most affected by tourists it might run up to eighteenpence. So
at Nuneaton we took a carriage for Coventry, a distance, with the
digressions we proposed, of about twelve miles, and set out, on a fair
August afternoon, to explore the George Eliot country.
Our driver looked blank at the mention of George Eliot, but brightened
at the name of Mary Anne Evans. He could not locate for us, however,
the school which she had attended in Nuneaton, but assured us that
"Mr. Jones 'ud know." To consult this oracle we drove through a
prosaic little town, dodging the flocks of sheep that were coming in
for the fair, to a stationer's shop. Mr. Jones, the photographer of
the neighbourhood, proved to be as well versed in George Eliot
literature and George Eliot localities as he was generous in imparting
his knowledge. He mapped out our course with all the concern and
kindliness of a host, and practically conferred upon us the freedom of
the city.
Nuneaton was as placidly engaged in making hats and ribbons as if the
foot of genius had never hallowed its soil, and went its ways,
regardless while we peered out at inns and residences mirrored in
George Eliot's writings. The school to which Robert Evans' "little
lass" used to ride in on donkeyback every morning, as the farmers'
daughters ride still, is The Elms on Vicarage Street,--a plain bit of
a place, with its bare walls and hard forms, to have been the scene of
the awakening of that keen intelligence. We were duly shown the
cloak-closet, to reach whose hooks a girl of eight or nine must have
had to stand on tiptoe, the small classrooms, and the backyard that
served as a playground. The educational equipment was of the
simplest,--but what of that? Hamlet could have been "bounded in a
nutshell," and here there was space enough for thought. A Nuneaton
lady, lodging with the caretaker during the vacation, told us with a
touch of quiet pride that her husband had known "Marian Evans" well in
their young days, and had often walked home with her of an evening
from the rectory.
As we drove away toward that rectory in Chilvers Coton, the parish
adjoining Nuneaton on the south, we could almost see the little
schoolgirl riding homeward on her donkey. It is Maggie Tulliver, of
"The Mill on the Floss," who reveals the nature of that tragic child,
"a creature full of eager and passionate longing for all that was
beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining
after dreamy music that died away, and would not come near to her;
with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link
together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give
her soul a sense of home in it."
Chilvers Coton, like Nuneaton, has no memories of its famous woman of
letters. The only time we saw her name that afternoon was as we drove,
two hours later, through a grimy colliery town where a row of posters
flaunted the legend:
ASK FOR GEORGE ELIOT SAUCE.
But in the Chilvers Coton church, familiar to readers of "Scenes from
Clerical Life," is a window given by Mr. Isaac Evans in memory of his
wife, not of his sister, with an inscription so like Tom Tulliver's
way of admonishing Maggie over the shoulder that we came near
resenting it:
"She layeth her hands to the spindle."
But we would not flout the domestic virtues, and still less would we
begrudge Tom's wife--not without her share of shadow, for no people
are so hard to live with as those who are always right--her tribute of
love and honour. So with closed lips we followed the sexton out into
the churchyard, past the much visited grave of "Milly Barton," past
the large recumbent monument that covers the honest ashes of Robert
Evans of Griff, and past so many fresh mounds that we exclaimed in
dismay. Our guide, however, viewed them with a certain decorous
satisfaction, and intimated that for this branch of his craft times
were good in Chilvers Coton, for an epidemic was rioting among the
children. "I've had twelve graves this month already," he said, "and
there"--pointing to where a spade stood upright in a heap of
earth--"I've got another to-day." We demurred about detaining him,
with such pressure of business on his hands, but he had already led
us, over briars and sunken slabs, to a stone inscribed with the name
of Isaac Pearson Evans of Griff and with the text:
"The memory of the just is blessed."
As we stood there, with our attendant ghoul telling us, in rambling,
gossipy fashion, what a respectable man Mr. Isaac Evans was, and how
he never would have anything to do with "his sister for years, but
after she married Mr. Cross he took her up again and went to her
funeral,"--how could we force out of mind a passage that furnishes
such strange commentary on that graven line?
"Tom, indeed, was of opinion that Maggie was a silly little
thing. All girls were silly.... Still he was very fond of his
sister, and meant always to take care of her, make her his
housekeeper, and punish her when she did wrong.... Tom, you
perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more
than the usual share of boy's justice in him--the justice
that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be
hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact
amount of their deserts."
It is in this parish of Chilvers Coton that George Eliot was born, in
a quiet brown house set among laden apple-trees, as we saw it, with a
bright, old-fashioned garden of dahlias, sweet peas, and hollyhocks.
The place is known as South Farm or Arbury Farm, for it is on the
grounds of Arbury Priory, one of the smaller monasteries that fell
prey to Henry VIII, now held by the Newdigate family. We drove to it
through a park of noble timber, where graceful deer were nibbling the
aristocratic turf or making inquisitive researches among the rabbit
warrens. Robert Evans, of Welsh origin, was a Staffordshire man. A
house-builder's son, he had himself begun life as a carpenter. Adam
Bede was made in his likeness. Rising to the position of forester and
then to that of land agent, he was living, at the time of his
daughter's birth, at Arbury Farm, in charge of the Newdigate estate.
Three or four months later he removed to Griff, an old brick farmhouse
standing at a little distance from the park, on the highroad. Griff
House passed, in due course of time, from the occupancy of Robert
Evans to that of his son, and on the latter's death, a few years ago,
was converted into a Dairy School "for gentleman-farmers' daughters."
Pleasant and benignant was its look that August afternoon, as it stood
well back among its beautiful growth of trees,--cut-leaf birch and
yellowing chestnut, Cedar of Lebanon, pine, locust, holly, oak, and
yew, with a pear-tree pleached against the front wall on one side,
while the other was thickly overgrown with ivy. Geraniums glowed about
the door, and the mellow English sunshine lay softly over all. This
was a sweet and tender setting for the figure of that ardent
wonder-child,--a figure imagination could not disassociate from that
of the sturdy elder brother, whose presence--if he were in affable and
condescending mood--made her paradise.
"They trotted along and sat down together, with no thought
that life would ever change much for them. They would only
get bigger and not go to school, and it would always be like
the holidays; they would always live together and be fond of
each other.... Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet
they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves
of those first years would always make part of their lives.
We could never have loved this earth so well if we had had no
childhood in it."
We forgave, as we lingered in that gracious scene, "the memory of the
just." For all Tom's virtues, he had given Maggie, though she was her
father's darling and had no lack of indulgent love about her, the
best happiness of her childhood. Across the years of misunderstanding
and separation she could write:
"But were another childhood's world my share,
I would be born a little sister there."
We had even a disloyal impulse of sympathy for these kinsfolk of
genius, who must needs pay the price by having their inner natures
laid bare before the world, but we checked it. Our worlds, little or
large, are bound to say and believe something concerning us: let us be
content in proportion as it approximates the truth.
Our road to Coventry ran through a mining district. Every now and then
we met groups of black-faced colliers. Robert Evans must often have
driven his daughter along this way, for in her early teens she was at
school in the City of the Three Spires, and later on, when her widowed
father resigned to his son his duties as land agent, and Griff House
with them, she removed there with him to make him a new home. The
house is still to be seen in Foleshill road, on the approach from the
north; but here the star of George Eliot pales before a greater
glory, the all-eclipsing splendour, for at Coventry we are on the
borders of the Shakespeare country.
Stratford-on-Avon lies only twenty miles to the south, and what were
twenty miles to the creator of Ariel and Puck? Surely his young
curiosity must have brought him early to this
"Quaint old town of toil and trouble,
Quaint old town of art and song."
The noble symmetries of St. Michael's, its companion spires of Holy
Trinity and Grey Friars, the narrow streets and over-jutting
housetops, the timber-framed buildings, the frescoed walls and carven
window-heads, all that we see to-day of the mediæval fashion he must
have seen in fresher beauty, and far more; yet even then the glory of
Coventry had departed. From the eleventh century, when Leofric, Earl
of Mercia, and his Countess of beloved memory, the Lady Godiva, built
their magnificent abbey, of which hardly a trace remains, the city had
been noted for its religious edifices. Its triple-spired cathedral of
St. Mary,--existing to-day in but a few foundation fragments,--its
monasteries and nunneries and churches of the various orders formed
an architectural group unmatched in England. Coventry was conspicuous,
too, for civic virtues. As its merchants increased in riches, they
lavished them freely on their queenly town. The Earl in his now
crumbled castle and the Lord Abbot had hitherto divided the rule, but
in 1345 came the first Mayor. It was while the Rose-red Richard sat so
gaily on his rocking throne that Coventry celebrated the completion of
its massive walls, three miles in circuit, with twelve gates and
thirty-two towers. In the middle of the fifteenth century it received
a special charter, and Henry VI declared it "the best governed city in
all his realm." It was then that the famous guilds of Coventry were at
their height, for its merchants had waxed wealthy in the wool trade,
and its artisans were cunning at cloth-making.
As we stood in St. Mary's Hall, erected toward the end of the
fourteenth century by the united fraternities known as the Holy
Trinity Guild, we realised something of the devotional spirit and
artistic joy of those old craftsmen. The oak roof of the Great Hall is
exquisitely figured with a choir of angels playing on their divers
instruments. In the kitchen--_such_ a kitchen, with stone arches and
fine old timber-work!--another angel peeps down to see that the
service of spit and gridiron is decorously done. The building
throughout abounds in carved panels, groined roofs, state chairs of
elaborate design, heraldic insignia, portraits, grotesques, and
displays a marvellous tapestry, peopled with a softly fading company
of saints and bishops, kings and queens.
Among the Coventry artists, that gladsome throng of architects,
painters, weavers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths who wrought so well
for the adornment of their city, John Thornton is best remembered. It
was he who made--so they say at Coventry--the east window of York
minster, and here in St. Mary's Hall he placed superb stained glass of
harmoniously blended browns. We could fancy a Stratford boy with hazel
eyes intent upon it, conning the faces of those English kings to whom
he was to give new life and longer reigns. Henry VI holds the centre,
thus revealing the date of the window, and near him are Henry IV and
Henry V, Lancastrian usurpers to whose side the partial dramatist has
lured us all. It was to join their forces at Shrewsbury that he sent
Falstaff marching through Coventry with his ragged regiment, whose
every soldier looked like "Lazarus in the painted cloth." Richard II
is conspicuous by his absence, but in writing his tragedy the young
Shakespeare remembered that Coventry was the scene of the attempted
trial at arms between Bolingbroke and the Duke of Norfolk. The secret
cause of the combat involved the honour of Richard, and he, not daring
to trust the issue, threw "his warder down," forbade the duel, and
sentenced both champions to
"tread the stranger paths of banishment."
But Shakespeare's Coventry, like Shakespeare's London, was largely a
city of ruins. Broken towers and desolate courts told of the ruthless
sweep of the Reformation. The cloth trade, too, was falling off, and
even that blue thread whose steadfast dye gave rise to the proverb
"True as Coventry blue" was less in demand under Elizabeth than under
Henry VIII. Yet though so much of its noble ecclesiastical
architecture was defaced or overthrown, though its tide of fortune
had turned, the city was lovely still, among its most charming
buildings being various charitable institutions founded and endowed by
wealthy citizens. That exquisite timber-and-plaster almshouse for aged
women, Ford's Hospital, then almost new, may have gained in mellow
tints with time, but its rich wood-work, one fretted story projecting
over another like the frilled heads of antiquated dames, row above
row, peering out to see what might be passing in the street beneath,
must have delighted the vision then as it delights it still. I dare
say Will Shakespeare, saucy lad that he was, doffed his cap and
flashed a smile as reviving as a beam of sunshine at some wistful old
body behind the diamond panes of her long and narrow window. For there
she would have been sitting, as her successor is sitting yet, trying
to be thankful for her four shillings a week, her fuel, her washing,
and her doctoring, but ever, in her snug corner, dusting and
rearranging the bits of things,--cups and spoons, a cushion or two,
Scripture texts,--her scanty salvage from the wreck of home. That the
pathos of the old faces enhances the picturesqueness of it all, those
eyes so keen to read the book of human life would not have failed to
note.
Coventry would have had for the seeking heart of a poet other
attractions than those of architectural beauty. It was a storied city,
with its treasured legend of Lady Godiva's ride--a legend not then
vulgarised by the Restoration addition of Peeping Tom--and with its
claim to be the birthplace of England's patron saint, the redoubtable
dragon slayer. A fourteenth-century poet even asserts of St. George
and his bride that they