like a little grange or farm. The rooms are small and low, and of a
pleasant domesticity; it is a place apt for a patriarchal life, where
simple people might live at close quarters with each other. The house
is hardly visible from the gate. You turn out of a steep lane,
embowered by trees, into a little gravel sweep, approaching the house
from the side. But its position is selected with admirable art; the
ground falls steeply in front of it, and you look out over a wide
valley, at the end of which Windermere lies, a tract of sapphire blue,
among wooded hills and dark ranges. Behind, the ground rises still
more steeply, to the rocky, grassy heights of Nab Scar; and the road
leads on to a high green valley among the hills, a place of unutterable
peace.
In this warm, sheltered nook, hidden in woods, with its southerly
aspect, the vegetation grows with an almost tropical luxuriance, so
that the general impression of the place is by no means typically
English. Laurels and rhododendrons grow in dense shrubberies; the
trees are full of leaf; flowers blossom profusely. There is a little
orchard beneath the house, and everywhere there is the fragrant and
pungent smell of sun-warmed garden-walks and box-hedges. There are
little terraces everywhere, banked up with stone walls built into the
steep ground, where stonecrops grow richly. One of these leads to a
little thatched arbour, where the poet often sat; below it, the ground
falls very rapidly, among rocks and copse and fern, so that you look
out on to the tree-tops below, and catch a glimpse of the steely waters
of the hidden lake of Rydal.
Wordsworth lived there for more than thirty years; and half a century
has passed since he died. He was a skilful landscape gardener; and I
suppose that in his lifetime, when the walks were being constructed and
the place laid out, it must have had a certain air of newness, of
interference with the old wild peace of the hillside, which it has
since parted with. Now it is all as full of a quiet and settled order,
as if it had been thus for ever. One little detail deserves a special
mention; just below the house, there is an odd, circular, low, grassy
mound, said to be the old meeting-place for the village council, in
primitive and patriarchal days,--the Mount, from which the place has
its name.
I thought much of the stately, simple, self-absorbed poet, whom somehow
one never thinks of as having been young; the lines of Milton haunted
me, as I moved about the rooms, the garden-terraces:--
"_In this mount he appeared; under this tree
Stood visible; among these pines his voice
I heard; here with him at this fountain talked._"
The place is all permeated with the thought of him, his deep and
tranquil worship of natural beauty, his love of the kindly earth.
I do not think that Wordsworth is one whose memory evokes a deep
personal attachment. I doubt if any figures of bygone days do that,
unless there is a certain wistful pathos about them; unless something
of compassion, some wish to proffer sympathy or consolation, mingles
with one's reverence. I have often, for instance, stayed at a house
where Shelley spent a few half-rapturous, half-miserable months.
There, meditating about him, striving to reconstruct the picture of his
life, one felt that he suffered much and needlessly; one would have
wished to shelter, to protect him if it had been possible, or at least
to have proffered sympathy to that inconsolable spirit. One's heart
goes out to those who suffered long years ago, whose love of the earth,
of life, of beauty, was perpetually overshadowed by the pain that comes
from realising transitoriness and decay.
But Wordsworth is touched by no such pathos. He was extraordinarily
prosperous and equable; he was undeniably self-sufficient. Even the
sorrows and bereavements that he had to bear were borne gently and
philosophically. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and did it.
Those sturdy, useful legs of his bore him many a pleasant mile. He
always had exactly as much money as he needed, in order to live his
life as he desired. He chose precisely the abode he preferred; his
fame grew slowly and solidly. He became a great personage; he was
treated with immense deference and respect. He neither claimed nor
desired sympathy; he was as strong and self-reliant as the old yeomen
of the hills, of whom he indeed was one; his vocation was poetry, just
as their vocation was agriculture; and this vocation he pursued in as
business-like and intent a spirit as they pursued their farming.
Wordsworth, indeed, was armed at all points by a strong and simple
pride, too strong to be vanity, too simple to be egotism. He is one of
the few supremely fortunate men in the history of literature, because
he had none of the sensitiveness or indecision that are so often the
curse of the artistic temperament. He never had the least misgivings
about the usefulness of his life; he wrote because he enjoyed it; he
ate and drank, he strolled and talked, with the same enjoyment. He had
a perfect balance of physical health. His dreams never left him cold;
his exaltations never plunged him into depression. He felt the
mysteries of the world with a solemn awe, but he had no uneasy
questionings, no remorse, no bewilderment, no fruitless melancholy.
He bore himself with the same homely dignity in all companies alike; he
was never particularly interested in any one; he never had any fear of
being thought ridiculous or pompous. His favourite reading was his own
poetry; he wished every one to be interested in his work, because he
was conscious of its supreme importance. He probably made the mistake
of thinking that it was his sense of poetry and beauty that made him
simple and tranquil. As a matter of fact, it was the simplicity and
tranquillity of his temperament that gave him the power of enjoyment in
so large a measure. There is no growth or expansion about his life; he
did not learn his serene and impassioned attitude through failures and
mistakes: it was his all along.
And yet what a fine, pure, noble, gentle life it was! The very thought
of him, faring quietly about among his hills and lakes, murmuring his
calm verse, in a sober and temperate joy, looking everywhere for the
same grave qualities among quiet homekeeping folk, brings with it a
high inspiration. But we tend to think of Wordsworth as a father and a
priest, rather than as a brother and a friend. He is a leader and a
guide, not a comrade. We must learn that, though he can perhaps turn
our heart the right way, towards the right things, we cannot
necessarily acquire that pure peace, that solemn serenity, by obeying
his precepts, unless we too have something of the same strong calmness
of soul. In some moods, far from sustaining and encouraging us, the
thought of his equable, impassioned life may only fill us with
unutterable envy. But still to have sat in his homely rooms, to have
paced his little terraces, does bring a certain imagined peace into the
mind, a noble shame for all that is sordid or mean, a hatred for the
conventional aims, the pitiful ambitions of the world.
Alas, that the only sound from the little hill-platform, the embowered
walks, should be the dull rolling of wheels--motors, coaches,
omnibuses--in the road below! That is the shadow of his greatness. It
is a pitiable thought that one of the fruits of his genius is that it
has made his holy retreat fashionable. The villas rise in rows along
the edges of the clear lakes, under the craggy fell-sides, where the
feathery ashes root among the mimic precipices. A stream of
chattering, vacuous, indifferent tourists pours listlessly along the
road from _table-d'hote_ to _table-d'hote_. The turbid outflow of the
vulgar world seems a profanation of these august haunts. One hopes
despairingly that something of the spirit of lonely beauty speaks to
these trivial heads and hearts. But is there consolation in this?
What would the poet himself have felt if he could have foreseen it all?
I descended the hill-road and crossed the valley highway; it was full
of dust; the vehicles rolled along, crowded with men smoking cigars and
reading newspapers, tired women, children whose idea of pleasure had
been to fill their hands with ferns and flowers torn from cranny and
covert. I climbed the little hill opposite the great Scar; its green
towering head, with its feet buried in wood, the hardy trees straggling
up the front wherever they could get a hold among the grey crags, rose
in sweet grandeur opposite to me. I threaded tracks of shimmering
fern, out of which the buzzing flies rose round me; I went by silent,
solitary places where the springs soak out of the moorland, while I
pondered over the bewildering ways of the world. The life, the ideals
of the great poet, set in the splendid framework of the great hills,
seemed so majestic and admirable a thing. But the visible results--the
humming of silly strangers round his sacred solitudes, the
contaminating influence of commercial exploitation--made one
fruitlessly and hopelessly melancholy.
But even so the hills were silent; the sun went down in a great glory
of golden haze among the shadowy ridges. The valleys lay out at my
feet, the rolling woodland, the dark fells. There fell a mood of
strange yearning upon me, a yearning for the peaceful secret that, as
the orange sunset slowly waned, the great hills seemed to guard and
hold. What was it that was going on there, what solemn pageant, what
sweet mystery, that I could only desire to behold and apprehend? I
know not! I only know that if I could discern it, if I could tell it,
the world would stand to listen; its littleness, its meanness, would
fade in that august light; the peace of God would go swiftly and
secretly abroad.
XXV
Dorsetshire
I am travelling just now, and am this week at _Dorchester_, in the
company of my oldest and best friend. We like the same things; and I
can be silent if I will, while I can also say anything, however
whimsical, that comes into my mind; there are few things better than
that in the world, and I count the precious hours very gratefully;
_appono lucro_.
Dorsetshire gives me the feeling of being a very old country. The big
downs seem like the bases of great rocky hills which have through long
ages been smoothed and worn away, softened and mellowed, the rocks,
grain by grain, carried downwards into the flat alluvial meadowlands
beneath. In these rich pastures, all intersected with clear streams,
runnels and water-courses, full at this season of rich water-plants,
the cattle graze peacefully. The downs have been ploughed and sown up
to the sky-line. Then there are fine tracts of heather and pines in
places. And then, too, there is a sense of old humanity, of ancient
wars about the land. There are great camps and earthworks everywhere,
with ramparts and ditches, both British and Roman. The wolds from
which the sea is visible are thickly covered with barrows, each holding
the mouldering bones of some forgotten chieftain, laid to rest, how
many centuries ago, with the rude mourning of a savage clan. I stood
on one of the highest of these the other day, on a great gorse-clad
headland, and sent my spirit out in quest of the old warrior that lay
below--"Audisne haec, Amphiaraee, sub terram condite?" But there was no
answer from the air; though in my sleep one night I saw a wild,
red-bearded man, in a coat of skins, with rude gaiters, and a hat of
foxes' fur on his head; he carried a long staff in his hand, pointed
with iron, and looked mutely and sorrowfully upon me. Who knows if it
was he?
And then of later date are many ruinous strongholds, with Cyclopean
walls, like the huge shattered bulk of _Corfe_, upon its green hill,
between the shoulders of great downs. There are broken abbeys,
pinnacled church-towers in village after village. And then, too, in
hamlet after hamlet, rise quaint stone manors, high-gabled,
many-mullioned, in the midst of barns and byres. One of the sweetest
places I have seen is _Cerne Abbas_. The road to it winds gently up
among steep downs, a full stream gliding through flat pastures at the
bottom. The hamlet has a forgotten, wistful air; there are many houses
in ruins. Close to the street rises the church-tower, of rich and
beautiful design, with gurgoyles and pinnacles, cut out of a soft
orange stone and delicately weathered. At the end of the village
stands a big farm-house, built out of the abbey ruins, with a fine
oriel in one of the granaries. In a little wilderness of trees, the
ground covered with primroses, stands the exquisite old gatehouse with
mullioned windows. I have had for years a poor little engraving of the
place, and it seemed to greet me like an old friend. Then, in the
pasture above, you can see the old terraces and mounds of the monastic
garden, where the busy Benedictines worked day by day; further still,
on the side of the down itself, is cut a very strange and ancient
monument. It is the rude and barbarous figure of a naked man, sixty
yards long, as though moving northwards, and brandishing a huge knotted
club. It is carved deep into the turf, and is overgrown with rough
grass. No one can even guess at the antiquity of the figure, but it is
probably not less than three thousand years old. Some say that it
records the death of a monstrous giant of the valley. The good monks
Christianised it, and named it _Augustine_. But it seems to be
certainly one of the frightful figures of which Caesar speaks, on which
captives were bound with twisted osiers, and burnt to death for a
Druidical sacrifice. The thing is grotesque, vile, horrible; the very
stones of the place seemed soaked with terror, cruelty and death. Even
recently foul and barbarous traditions were practised there, it is
said, by villagers, who were Christian only in name. Yet it lay
peacefully enough to-day, the shadows of the clouds racing over it, the
wind rustling in the grass, with nothing to break the silence but the
twitter of birds, the bleat of sheep on the down, and the crying of
cocks in the straw-thatched village below.
What a strange fabric of history, memory, and tradition is here
unrolled, of old unhappy far-off things! How bewildering to think of
the horrible agonies of fear, the helpless, stupefied creatures lying
bound there, the smoke sweeping over them and the flames crackling
nearer, while their victorious foes laughed and exulted round them, and
the priests performed the last hideous rites. And all the while God
watched the slow march of days from the silent heaven, and worked out
his mysterious purposes! And yet, surveying the quiet valley to-day,
it seems as though there were no memory of suffering or sorrow in it at
all.
We climbed the down; and there at our feet the world lay like a map,
with its fields, woods, hamlets and church-towers, the great rich plain
rolling to the horizon, till it was lost in haze. How infinitely
minute and unimportant seemed one's own life, one's own thoughts, the
schemes of one tiny moving atom on the broad back of the hills. And
yet my own small restless identity is almost the only thing in the
world of which I am assured!
There came to me at that moment a thrill of the spirit which comes but
rarely; a deep hope, the sense of a secret lying very near, if one
could only grasp it; an assurance that we are safe and secure in the
hand of God, and a certainty that there is a vast reality behind,
veiled from us only by the shadows of fears, ambitions, and desires.
And the thought, too, came that all the tiny human beings that move
about their tasks in the plain beneath--nay, the animals, the trees,
the flowers, every blade of grass, every pebble--each has its place in
the great and awful mystery. Then came the sense of the vast
fellowship of created things, the tender Fatherhood of the God who made
us all. I can hardly put the thought into words; but it was one of
those sudden intuitions that seem to lie deeper even than the mind and
the soul, a message from the heart of the world, bidding one wait and
wonder, rest and be still.
XXVI
Portland
I will put another little sketch side by side with the last, for the
sake of contrast; I think it is hardly possible within the compass of a
few days to have seen two scenes of such minute and essential
difference. At _Cerne_ I had the tranquil loneliness of the
countryside, the silent valley, the long faintly-tinted lines of
pasture, space and stillness; the hamlets nestled among trees in the
dingles of the down. To-day I went south along a dusty road; at first
there were quiet ancient sights enough, such as the huge grass-grown
encampment of _Maiden Castle_, now a space of pasture, but still
guarded by vast ramparts and ditches, dug in the chalk, and for a
thousand years or more deserted. The downs, where they faced the sea,
were dotted with grassy barrows, air-swept and silent. We topped the
hill, and in a moment there was a change; through the haze we saw the
roofs of _Weymouth_ laid out like a map before us, with the smoke
drifting west from innumerable chimneys; in the harbour, guarded by the
slender breakwaters, floated great ironclads, black and sinister bulks;
and beyond them frowned the dark front of _Portland_. Very soon the
houses began to close in upon the road,--brick-built, pretentious,
bow-windowed villas; then we were in the streets, showing a wholesome
antiquity in the broad-windowed mansions of mellow brick, which sprang
into life when the honest king George III. made the quiet port
fashionable by spending his simple summers there. There was the king's
lodging itself, Gloucester House, now embedded in a hotel, with the big
pilastered windows of its saloons giving it a faded courtly air. Soon
we were by the quays, with black red-funnelled steamers unloading, and
all the quaint and pretty bustle of a port. We went out to a
promontory guarded by an old stone fort, and watched a red merchant
steamer roll merrily in, blowing a loud sea-horn. Then over a
low-shouldered ridge, and we were by the great inner roads, full of
shipping; we sat for a while by the melancholy walls of an ancient
Tudor castle, now crumbling into the sea; and then across the narrow
causeway that leads on to _Portland_. On our right rose the _Chesil
Bank_, that mysterious mole of orange shingle, which the sea, for some
strange purpose of its own, has piled up, century after century, for
eighteen miles along the western coast. And then the grim front of
_Portland Island_ itself loomed out above us. The road ran up steeply
among the bluffs, through line upon line of grey-slated houses; to the
left, at the top of the cliff, were the sunken lines of the huge fort,
with the long slopes of its earthworks, the glacis overgrown with
grass, and the guns peeping from their embrasures; to the left, dipping
to the south, the steep grey crags, curve after curve. The streets
were alive with an abundance of merry young sailors and soldiers,
brisk, handsome boys, with the quiet air of discipline that converts a
country lout into a self-respecting citizen. An old bronzed sergeant
led a child with one hand, and with the other tried to obey her shrill
directions about whirling a skipping-rope, so that she might skip
beside him; he looked at us with a half-proud, half-shamefaced smile,
calling down a rebuke for his inattention from the girl.
We wound slowly up the steep roads smothered in dust; landwards the
view was all drowned in a pale haze, but the steep grey cliffs by
_Lulworth_ gleamed with a tinge of gold across the sea.
At the top, one of the dreariest landscapes I have ever seen met the
sight. The island lies, so to speak, like a stranded whale, the great
head and shoulders northwards to the land. The moment you surmount the
top, the huge, flat side of the monster is extended before you,
shelving to the sea. Hardly a tree grows there; there is nothing but a
long perspective of fields, divided here and there by stone walls, with
scattered grey houses at intervals. There is not a feature of any kind
on which the eye can rest. In the foreground the earth is all
tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretch in every direction, with huge,
gaunt, straddling, gallows-like structures emerging, a wheel spinning
at the top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of grey
_debris_, interspersed with stunted grass, huge excavations, ugly
ravines with a spout of grim stone at the seaward opening, like the
burrowings of some huge mole. The placid green slopes of the fort give
an impression of secret strength, even grandeur. Otherwise it is but a
ragged, splashed aquarelle of grey and green. Over the _debris_ appear
at a distance the blunt ominous chimneys of the convict prison, which
seems to put the finishing touch on the forbidding character of the
scene.
To-day the landward view was all veiled in haze, which seemed to shut
off the sad island from the world. On a clear day, no doubt, the view
must be full of grandeur, the inland downs, edged everywhere with the
tall scarped cliffs, headland after headland, with the long soft line
of the _Chesil Bank_ below them. But on a day of sea mist, it must be,
I felt, one of the saddest and most mournful regions in the world, with
no sound but the wail of gulls, and the chafing of the surge below.
XXVII
Canterbury Tower
To-day I had a singular pleasure heightened by an intermingled
strangeness and even terror--qualities which bring out the quality of
pleasure in the same way that a bourdon in a pedal-point passage brings
out the quality of what a German would, I think, call the _over-work_.
I was at _Canterbury_, where the great central tower is wreathed with
scaffolding, and has a dim, blurred outline from a distance, as though
it were being rapidly shaken to and fro. I found a friendly and
communicable man who offered to take me over it; we climbed a dizzy
little winding stair, with bright glimpses at intervals, through
loop-holes, of sunlight and wheeling birds; then we crept along the top
of a vaulted space with great pockets of darkness to right and left.
Soon we were in the gallery of the lantern, from which we could see the
little people crawling on the floor beneath, like slow insects. And
then we mounted a short ladder which took us out of one of the great
belfry windows, on to the lowest of the planked galleries. What a
frail and precarious structure it seemed: the planks bent beneath our
feet. And here came the first exquisite delight--that of being close
to the precipitous face of the tower, of seeing the carved work which
had never been seen close at hand since its erection except by the
jackdaws and pigeons. I was moved and touched by observing how fine
and delicate all the sculpture was. There were rows and rows of little
heraldic devices, which from below could appear only as tiny fretted
points; yet every petal of rose or _fleur-de-lys_ was as scrupulously
and cleanly cut as if it had been meant to be seen close at hand; a
waste of power, I suppose; but what a pretty and delicate waste! and
done, I felt, in faithful days, when the carving was done as much to
delight, if possible, the eye of God, as to please the eye of man.
Higher and higher we went, till at last we reached the parapet. And
then by a dizzy perpendicular ladder to which I committed myself in
faith, we reached a little platform on the very top of one of the
pinnacles. The vane had just been fixed, and the stone was splashed
with the oozing solder. And now came the delight of the huge view all
round: the wooden heights, the rolling hills; old church towers rose
from flowering orchards; a mansion peeped through immemorial trees; and
far to the north-east we could see the white cliff of _Pegwell Bay_;
endeared to me through the beautiful picture by Dyce, where the pale
crags rise from the reefs green with untorn weeds. There on the
horizon I could see shadowy sails on the steely sea-line.